Goon Astray

One British comedy that may be lost on American audiences

by David Anthony Fox

UNfunny farm: (L-R) Colin McPhillamy and David Beach pay tribute to an cult radio show in Roy Smiles' Ying Tong: A Walk with the Goons. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

British humor comes in two varieties: very dry, and all wet. The Wilma has made a specialty of the former (Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill), so I guess it's inevitable it would arrive at the latter. Ying Tong celebrates The Goon Show, a cultish '50s British radio program that reveled in the broadest of broad comedy. Goon fanatics — and there are some, mostly in England — will brag that the show was a brilliant founding document for Monty Python, and they must think that's a good thing. (If you don't, stop reading immediately. This play will be of no interest to you.) I concede only this: The Goon Show was steeped in first-rate talent, including comics Harry Secombe and the great Peter Sellers, as well as Spike Milligan, who was the chief writer as well as a performer.

Ying Tong (the title comes from a favorite Goon song), by playwright Roy Smiles, is a nostalgic re-creation of The Goon Show itself and, more ambitiously, also a portrait of Milligan during a most serious moment in his life: a nervous breakdown that occurred mid-Goon, manifesting itself when, among other things, he attempted to murder Sellers with a potato peeler. Milligan spent a considerable amount of time in an institution.

The Goon evocations are the easier part of Ying Tong to assess. On this level, the show will be self-recommending to fans, though this cast only begins to suggest the originals. Ed Jewett as Secombe is best. Steven Beckingham as Sellers is worst, turning the virtuoso actor into an annoying twerp.

David Beach, who plays Milligan, has by far the hardest assignment, for in addition to mimicking Milligan's Goon performances, he must also portray his depressive, in-crisis, offstage self. This aspect of the play we might call "The Loon Show," and while I admire Smiles' ambition, I found the whole thing tedious: unfunny as comedy, unmoving as drama.

It could be that the problem is with this production. Director Jiri Zizka's work is, as usual, a treat for eye and ear (kudos to sets, costumes, lighting and sound by David P. Gordon, Janus Stefanowicz, Jerold R. Forsyth and Jorge Cousineau, respectively). But the acting values — really, the human dimension of the story — go largely unmarked.

More than any of that, is there even an audience in the U.S. for this piece of historical marginalia?

(d_fox@citypaper.net)

Ying Tong: A Walk with the Goons Through March 16, Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St., 215-546-7824.