All Smiles

The Goons jump across the pond.

by A.D. Amorosi

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

With Ying Tong: A Walk with the Goons, the Wilma takes a step into madness beyond its usual lunacy. Penned by Brit playwright Roy Smiles, the play looks behind the absurd scenes of The Goon Show, Spike Milligan's 1950s BBC radio comedy. The result is extreme silliness: gay Vikings, Jewish leprechauns and other brands of Dada giddiness all speaking in the show's signature high voices. Fortunately, Smiles seems to have escaped the experience (a little bit) more stable than the Goons.

City Paper: How and why did you come to want to premiere this baby at the Wilma? Did knowing the history of the theater with Stoppard plays influence you?

Roy Smiles: I'd no idea that the Wilma had championed Tom Stoppard. I found out when I arrived in Philadelphia, so God bless 'em, as I think The Real Inspector Hound is one of the funniest English plays ever written.

CP: What was the first ever episode you can remember of The Goon Show?

RS: It was probably "The Dreaded Batter-Pudding Hurler" episode, which, as you deeply inarticulate colonials might say, still "rocks."

CP: How did British audiences react to your play? Even my brief time in London showed me that they get misty just thinking of the silliness of the Goons.

RS: The English were a very oppressed people in the 1950s. We'd lost an empire and bankrupt ourselves fighting a war against Germany and Japan. For a country repressed by the grayness of rationing and post-war hardship, the Goons were a shot of anarchistic Technicolor. Though they were "only" comics, they were hugely important in the English freeing themselves of a serf mentality. If I get more pompous, feel free to stab me.

CP: How did you go about getting into the squishy insides of Milligan's pain and malady? Did you ever truly come to understand why he tried to kill fellow Goon Peter Sellers with a potato peeler?

RS: The poor sod went stark raving mad trying to write the great comic scripts of his times. The hugely more successful and better-looking Sellers used to stroll in from his various movie sets looking smug and effortlessly stealing every show. If you were the writer and Sellers was the "star," you might well want to stab him with a potato peeler. Having said that, may I just say legally and morally doing that to a Peter Sellers near you would be wrong.

CP: Don't you think that if every comic got "cured" of being bipolar, as both Sellers and Milligan were, there'd be no comedy left?

RS: Having sworn on the sword of Thor to all the Viking gods I hold holy [that] I would never as long as I live write another play about comedians, I am currently writing a play about the Monty Python team titled Pythoesque for a South African producer. Researching the project, I noticed Michael Palin — possibly the finest comic actor since Peter Sellers — is a rational, happy, downright cheery family man without any psychiatric problems at all. So I suspect it might be just possible to be a comedian without [being] a basket case; though, to be frank, not often.

CP: What's your favorote Goons memory?

RS: I was a deeply inept writer on The Wogan Show, a shallow chat show in England in the early 1990s. We'd heard that Spike Milligan was going to be on the show, so every writer, producer, cameraman and grip in BBC television was packed into the hospitality lounge to meet the great man. By an overenthusiastic researcher he was shown to the door, opened it, saw 300 people waiting for him, sneered "fucking freeloaders," turned on his heels and went home. Thus I nearly got to meet genius.

CP: So often when directors and writers relive the greatest of comic moments, they seem to hammer us with the notion of "historically, this is really funny and you should think so." How do you guys avoid that trap?

RS: Trust me, I've long since hammered out any comic moments of this script with my relentless quest for authenticity. I've done it in London, Leeds, New Zealand and Australia, and I can do it again, I tell you!

CP: How do even begin to cast something like this?

RS: Anyone who can get near the vocal dexterity of the Goons guys and can even approach the madness, speed and anarchic drivel gets my vote.

CP: Are younger audiences understanding the Goons and your take on them?

RS: I assumed the audience for the play would be the over-40 set, but it's got a huge reaction in England, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa from the under-25s. Maybe it's the relentlessly cheap jokes.

CP: What did having to write 20-plus drafts of this do for the play's freshness?

RS: Rewriting this play 23 times had nothing to do with freshness. It had to do with the unfeasible and unbearable egos of producers and directors of the English theater scene who are incapable of allowing a writer freedom to express himself without their constant and intrusive interference. Not that I'm bitter. All I need is a high-powered rifle and a grassy knoll.

CP: I know you did standup, but are you funny yourself?

RS: Truthfully? I sucked as a standup comic. But I was not so much a standup comic as a standup manic depressive. I used to make happy audiences miserable. But when I write plays — and this is my 16th — and let the actors do my lines, I somehow manage to be wildly amusing. Being a playwright gives you the comfort zone of letting other people get your laughs. Having said that, I'm pretty well-known in England as a guy that writes very funny plays.

Ying Tong: A Walk with The Goons

Directed by Jiri Zizka, runs through March 16, $37-$52, Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 215-546-7824, wilmatheater.org