Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall, York Theatre Royal, March 16 to 20

1:18pm Friday 12th March 2010

By Charles Hutchinson

SHOLTO Morgan is making his professional stage debut in the lead role of Spike in Spike Milligan’s celebrated war memoirs Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall, and all because he trumpeted his musical services.

“I knew [casting agent] Jill Green needed a trumpet player so I wrote to her and didn’t hear anything back, but a week later I just called up to see if she’d got one, and she said, ‘Would you like to come in?’,” recalls Sholto.

“So I trundled along with my trumpet to Goodge Street, and I didn’t know what to wear for the audition, but I read for the part of Spike, and two days later played the trumpet for them, and then another two days later, I had a singing audition.”

In total, Sholto underwent six auditions in two weeks, not easy to fit in at short notice when he was already balancing seven part-time jobs at the time, such as working as a film extra and waiting tables at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, and elsewhere.

“I’m not very good at being a waiter,” he admits. “I get easily distracted, especially in a building like the Theatre Royal, where I’d play hookie and watch the play and eat more vol au vents than I gave out.”

Now, however, the former LAMDA and University of East Anglia student is concentrating on playing Gunner Milligan in Ben Power and Tim Carroll’s stage adaptation of four of Milligan’s memoirs, wherein Spike and his jazz quartet, adrift on the tide of great historic events, discover how humour, music and comradeship can enable a hapless bunch of young men to prevail against the might of the Nazi war machine.

Plenty of research has gone into Sholto’s performance, from reading biographies and history books to learning about Spike’s family past in India and studying Milligan’s performances. “It was all about making this character real, so, to use an analogy, it’s rather like an iceberg. You only see ten per cent of the iceberg, and in terms of seeing Spike, you only see ten per cent on the surface, but I read a lot to build up the characterisation,” he says.

“I also listened to Milligan rather more than I watched him on the Goons shows, to familiarise myself with his voice, and I watched him being interviewed on Wogan where he was in more relaxed mood.

“He’s like a rubber band, long rather than wide. He was really elastic and then, ping, he would be gone, quicker than anyone else.”

Sholto is playing Milligan from the age of 21. “He’s a young man with ambitions but of course he doesn’t know he’s going to end up on The Goons,” he says.

Nevertheless, Sholto and audience alike come to the show with the benefit of hindsight. “Looking back at The Goons, you can see how they set the scene for Paul Merton and Eddie Izzard and the Pythons of course,” he says.

“This play is interesting in that it’s knowing but there’s also a naivety or more that he’s an inquisitive man, at an age when you’re less tarnished but fascinated.

“He shows the absurdity of war, when they didn’t really know what they were doing, like arriving in Italy and being told just to dig holes, and it was these experiences that formed the great characters he then created for The Goons.”