Spike is an absurdly funny new play that delves into the inner workings of one of Britain’s most unique and brilliantly irreverent comedy minds. Set in the booming fifties, while the UK was in the clutches of Goon mania, it tells the story of one particular Goon, Spike Milligan, whose obsession with finding the funny sees him push the boundaries of comedy, as well as test the patience of everyone around him… The play features a lighting design by Rory Beaton who approached White Light (WL) to supply his lighting fixtures.  

Spike is a star-studded affair, written by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman (The Wipers Times) and features a cast that includes Olivier Award-winning actor John Dalgleish (Sunny Afternoon) as Spike Milligan and Stephen Fry as the voice of the BBC Announcer.  Rory explains: “This is a genuinely hilarious show that gives audiences a real insight into Spike Milligan’s life. The way the show is written is extremely filmic; in the sense there are a LOT of location changes in very quick succession. As such, a huge part of my job as lighting designer was to work with the wonderful set designer Katie Lias to create these different locations; given the fact that one minute the characters are in a recording studio or BBC exec office and literally seconds later they’re in Monte Cassino being bombed in the war! And whilst they work together, the two worlds of set and lighting are very different: Katie has designed beautiful sketch-like backcloths for the ’here and now’ moments whilst I take us to a much more noir, smoky memory-world during the flashbacks”. 

Rehearsals for the show began at the start of this year at The Watermill Theatre prior to its run at the venue – a process that Rory was very much involved with. He comments: “Given the show relies heavily on a smooth flow throughout, being able to feed into the scene changes and the movement was key. The rehearsals for the tour were slightly deceptive – on the one hand we knew what worked and what hadn’t quite landed in the room for the Watermill run. However, having to regroup before taking the show on the road, we then had a short amount of time to flesh out certain parts and make it fully tourable so any changes we made needed to be watertight very quickly – which added a certain amount of pressure!”. 

Knowing what he needed to achieve with his design, Rory approached the Customer Service team at WL. He comments: “Whilst on the road, the show has to be in-and-up in literally a day so reliability and flexibility was key; not to mention being budget-friendly! The rig is predominantly Viper Performances and Mac Auras, along with a handful of ColorSource Profiles and some ColorForce72 battens. There is also a lovely IWB par-bar of self-proclaimed “tasteless” colours which live flies during the show to give us the feeling we’re at a performance in the Coventry Hippodrome. We also have the usual range of smoke and haze machines to keep us suitably fogged and, most importantly, a mirror ball! 

He adds: “The Auras ended up being predominantly pipe-end general cover units with the Vipers overhead doing mostly a gobo wash as well as a few little specials here and there. The ColorSource Profiles were head-height boom units whilst the ColorForces take on the bulk of the cloth lighting”.  

As with any touring production, the fact that Spike was visiting so many different venues also had an impact on Rory’s design. He comments: “We visit a huge range of venues with this show- everything from the cavernous but beautiful Aylesbury Waterside to the thrust-stage of Salisbury Playhouse. This meant a lot of head-scratching early doors as to how to fit into all these venues – although hopefully all of that planning paid off!  The whole tour needed to be really light on its feet (no pun intended…) because of the schedule. As such, the necessity for moving lights, whilst they might seem like overkill, are actually two-fold: although they don’t do many positions, we are only able to re-light so many presets in the time and by rigging movers we avoid any overhead focus”. 

Following its initial run at the Watermill Theatre, Spike began its UK tour at the Cheltenham Everyman Theatre and will continue to visit venues across UK for the rest of the year.   

Rory concludes: “This show was such a success and only made possible thanks to the brilliant team who were working on it. This includes Jack Ryan (Programmer), Sam Baker and Tom Lightbody (Production Electricians) and the wonderful team at the Cheltenham Everyman – all of who’s efforts are the reasons this show happened in the timeframe that it did with so little hiccup. I am hugely grateful to all of them, as well as to the team at WL for their brilliant support once again”. 

Photos courtesy of Pamela Raith.

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