11:46am Saturday 13th February 2010
Viv Hardwick meets the young actor playing comic genius and musician Spike Mill.
PERHAPS it’s best that the king of the madcap clowns, Spike Milligan, is played by a 27-year-old who hardly knew anything about the Goon Show giant held in such high regard by men of a certain age, and their children who have grown up with Eccles and Bluebottle impersonations.
The wonderfully-named Sholto Morgan is making his stage debut in Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall, which tours to Darlington Civic Theatre next week and Newcastle Theatre Royal in April.
The first surprise is that the Aberdeen- born actor speaks with a very upper-class accent.
“I knew Spike was a very important person in terms of comedy and realised he was linked to The Goon Show and Peter Sellers. But I first became aware of him through his poetry.
When I was a boy of about five I had to learn one of his nonsense poems, the one about the ABC,” he says.
The man who got his name from the Gaelic word for sower of seed or king of men and “a Welshman who came to Scotland many generations ago”, landed his role in the production having written to the casting director asking for a chance to audition.
“When I went to the audition, to get in the right frame of mind, I watched a lot of Eddie Izzard (who counts Milligan as an influence) and Ken Dodd,” says the actor, who did read Milligan’s best-selling World War Two Memoirs, which eventually ran to seven volumes.
Morgan had heard that the book adaptation by Ben Power and Tim Carroll was looking for an actor who could play the trumpet. “I’d left drama school in 2007 and was looking for my first job. Five auditions later I got the part, although I’d just thought about being part of this jazz quartet.
“I actually played Ain’t Misbehavin’ at my audition, then I had to learn all these wonderful tunes like Chattanooga Choo-Choo and One O’Clock Jump. It was a huge challenge to take on all this music and the lead role, but I felt ready to play it. Originally, I thought I’d be cast in a Chekov or Shakespeare play and this was a wonderful surprise because it really pushes me as an actor and performer to combine playing a music instrument with being able to sing, act and dance,” says Morgan.
He began touring with Spike in September and says that playing the comedy hero is a bit like being an elastic band. “He’s so stretchy and then be pings back always to his own shape. So I had to get his physical shape right. He was tall, bouncy and cheeky and always buoyant. I think his unspoken motto was ‘Go for it, and why not’. If he held back slightly he couldn’t have pulled off things like the inimitable line where he insulted the Prince of Wales, which I thought was wonderful,” Morgan says.
HE’S playing Spike from the age of 21 to 23 when the budding jazz singer and trumpeter had joined up for the Royal Artillery and was about to endure historic highs and lows in North Africa and Italy.
Morgan feels that Spike’s depressions and outbursts in later life were fuelled by his wartime experiences.
“I think it awakened the dormant enemy of his depression,” he says of the comic, who died in 2002 and has the famous gravestone inscription “I told you I was ill”.
The play has been seen by Spike’s widow, Shelagh, who praised his portrayal, and Morgan concludes: “If he was still alive and came to see it, I think he would say to me ‘Go for it’.
And I am laying the tracks for what he’d later become.”
■ Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall: Darlington Civic Theatre, Monday to Friday, £13.50-£20. Box Office: 01325- 486555. Darlington.gov.uk. Also: Newcastle Theatre Royal, April 13- 17, £8.50-£27.50. 08448-112-121 theatreroyal.co.uk
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