Tag: reviews

Six Charlies in Search of an Author
a review by Richard Usher

There have been four professional UK stage productions of The Goon Show since 2014, and it is rare for amateur dramatic groups to gain permission to perform these classic shows, so it must have been a delightful surprise for the members of the Stockton Heath Methodist Dramatic Society when they got the green light to stage Six Charlies in Search of an Author.

The production was part of a double bill of classic radio shows adapted to stage performance, the first half being Orson Welles’ legendary War of the Worlds. These two shows might seem strange bedfellows at first glance, but as it turned out, they complemented each other rather well.

The stage set was extremely well-made and was a convincing backdrop for a vintage radio theatre, complete with CBS logo. The Goon Show offering made up the second half of the bill and was introduced by director Paul Thompson in a style that slightly echoed the John Browell and Dirk Maggs openings to The Last Goon Show of All and Goon Again. The entrance of a sound operator in a white coat and the request to take us from 1930’s America to Britain in 1956 added a lovely touch of the surreal to the proceedings, especially when he nodded and swapped the CBS logo for a plaque displaying a vintage BBC logo.

If you went along expecting to see a group of actors channel Sellers, Secombe and Milligan you would have been disappointed. What we got instead was the cast taking on the various roles the original Goons played in the show, and it worked a treat! Hazel Bradley bravely took on the Wallace Greenslade role and delivered her lines with true BBC announcer aplomb. Nonagenarian thesp, Bert Rigby, took on the roles of Jim Spriggs, the famous Eccles and Henry Crun and clearly had a lot of fun with the characters. The same can be said of Gill Murphy who gave us her best Grytpype Thynne and Bluebottle, and Alex Clarke erupting on stage as Major Bloodnok and doing his best to convey Moriarty. While Kevin Mottershead may not have had the well built and diminutive stature of Neddy Seagoon, he left you in no doubt that he was an equally energetic Charlie.

Musical contributions were few, and this production definitely owed a lot to the director’s love of the EMI Goon But Not Forgotten album version, and none the worse for it. The big plus was the array of spot FX, brilliantly performed live on stage and ably assisted by some terrific sound design from Mike Rigby.

This show was not a tribute act, nor was it trying to re-imagine the Goon Show of old. It was an enthusiastic, very well directed and energetically performed piece of theatre that proved beyond doubt that the script writing of Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens can transcend its original context and still get the laughs and applause.