Spike Milligan spent the 1940s fighting the war — and the 50s fighting the BBC. That's the argument ventured by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman in their play about the tormented comedian, who channelled his combat experiences into that "shellshock on radio" sensation. The Goon Show. Spike focuses on the early years of Milligan's still-fragile success. Audiences love the show, it makes his co-stars Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers famous — but Milligan struggles with overwork, PTSD symptoms and the open disdain of the BBC's top brass.

It's a sympathetic portrait, then, of the Anglo-Irishman, the more so for John Dagleish's likably hangdog turn in the title role. It's Milligan with a pinch of Harry Corbett thrown in: shabby, chippy and unable to stop cracking wise, even when there's a noose around his neck. Director Paul Hart summons the spirit of the Goons with a fast-paced, capering production, one short scene after another hurling us from the Grafton Arms back to the battlefields of Monte Cassino and forward to the recording studios of the BBC.

The dash distracts you from the lack of depth. The play paints Milligan's fraught psychology in broad brushstrokes. His encounters with broadcasting's stuffed shirts, as represented by blithering Robert Mountford, are enjoyable but cartoonish. Vivid as they are, George Kemp's smooth Sellers and Jeremy Lloyd's hearty Secombe are only ever supporting — and supportive — roles. And there's no real dramatic shape to the tale Spike tells. The BBC's snobbishness and Milligan's fatigue are constants. Milligan's eventual triumph, as the Goons' audience figures become irresistible, is told not shown: the battle of wills between corporation and comic lacks a climax.

But as an overview of a revolutionary moment in comedy history, it's nimbly done, with a fun role carved out for Margaret Cabourn-Smith's Foley artist Janet (and a thankless one for Ellie Morris as Spike's beleaguered wife). The impression is potent of a talent who needed pricks to kick against, and in doing so — notably here with a Goons Orwell parody mocking "the Big Brother Corporation" — loosed British entertainment from the chains of deference. For that, he deserves thanks — and this buoyant tribute.

BRIAN LOGAN

Without Spike Milligan, there might have been no Monty Python, no Pete and Dud, nor any of their descendants. For anyone who doesn't know the comic's pioneering work, Ian Hislop and Nick Newman's easygoing play fills in some of the blanks. While the piece needs tightening — there's too much duelling with the powers-that-be at the BBC — John Dagleish gives a fine performance as a man on the cusp between genius and neurosis.

Dagleish isn't as zany as you'd expect. It's disconcerting, in fact, that his rumpled features are more reminiscent of an earthier talent, Sid James. All the same, he captures the way Milligan could seem lost to the world, preoccupied with the voices rattling around inside his head.

Hislop and Newman's stage collaborations include the First World War play The Wipers Times. The focus this time is on the 1950s, when — as part of Prince Charles's favourite comedy act, the Goons — Milligan developed a manic stream of consciousness. Not surprisingly, the BBC was at a loss to know what to do with him; the bulk of the script explores how the corporation's management tried to rein him in.

Paul Hart's direction is restless. Robert Mountford — who made such a strong impression recently with Vagabonds, his poetic one-man show about the Thin Lizzy rocker Phil Lynott — is the unnamed BBC executive archetype who treats Milligan as junior partner to the much more handsomely remunerated Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. Having rebelled against the officer class during his army days (an early flashback shows him in action at Monte Cassino), Milligan found himself fighting more battles.

The emphasis on the tiffs with management means we never see enough of his evolving relationship with Secombe and Sellers. Jeremy Lloyd, however, captures the Welshman's cheeky chappy persona, while George Kemp's version of Sellers gives us a suave Savile Row chameleon adept at masking his psychological frailties.

The intimate Watermill is an appropriate setting for Katie Lias's retro radio-studio set (there's an upper tier as well, which isn't used to full effect). Margaret Cabourn-Smith, in an authentically dowdy cardigan, has lots of fun as a technician demonstrating the sound effects. James Mack doubles up as Goons producers Dennis Main-Wilson and Peter Eton.

True, the second act meanders, but this is an evening that also delivers a merciless send-up of posturing metropolitan critics, as well as extracts from Milligan's spoof of Nineteen Eighty-Four. If you were never a Goons fan, you may not be entirely won over. (I'd better admit that I've always found the humour just a bit too frantic.) True believers, on the other hand, will be mouthing some of the lines.

CLIVE DAVIS

The Goon Show," drawls a pretentious critic in Spike, "is essentially shell-shock on radio." That's the play's thesis, too. The explosive anarchy of that 1950s radio series — a comedy touchstone for Spike's playwrights, Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, in their work on Spitting Image — was bound up with the wartime trauma of its mercurial writer, Spike Milligan. For Spike, Spike suggests, the war never really ended; it continued as a war against the world — and, in particular, various uncomprehending BBC stuffed-shirts.

It's an idea hammered home by Kate Lias's striking two-tier set design. In one scene, Milligan (John Dagleish) is in an office — the room suggested by a Milliganish doodled backdrop — discussing the show with a pompous BBC executive (Robert Mountford, Goonishly one-dimensional, and very funny). They're squabbling over sound-effects; Milligan thinks the bomb noises aren't loud enough. An explosion rings out, and in a flash what seemed to be a solid wall above their heads becomes a window onto no-man's-land, all smoke and rubble. Later, as Milligan wrestles against overwhelming deadlines, that hill of blasted earth is replaced by a heap of scrunched-up pages.

Laughter in the trenches is a familiar topic for Hislop and Newman, who had a great success at this theatre with their First World War comedy The Wipers Times. I can imagine Spike proving equally popular, at least with anyone old enough to get misty-eyed at the names Eccles and Bluebottle. (Hislop and Newman have said they hope it'll win over new Goon fans; I'm not confident it will.)

As Milligan, John Dagleish wisely doesn't attempt a straightforward impression (though his brief imitations of Goon Show characters are spot-on). But he captures Milligan's restless, furtive physicality; he doesn't wear his baggy clothes so much as hide inside them, like a turtle in its shell. Compared to his then more famous - and considerably better- paid - Goon Show co-stars, Peter Sellers (George Kemp) and Harry Secombe (Jeremy Lloyd), he's a man allergic to limelight, though desperate for success.

Milligan feared his obituary would read "wrote The Goon Show and died", but that's essentially the obit Spike gives him; his poetry and novels don't get a look-in. It's an affectionate, efficient tribute which, by limiting its scope to the 1950s, creates an uplifting plot-arc but can't help playing into the myth of genius fuelled by madness: we see Milligan in an asylum hospital-bed, begging for a pencil; Milligan typing frantically in time with The Flight of the Bumblebee; Milligan faking his suicide backstage at a gig in Coventry, a joke that mightn't have been a joke.

Hislop and Newman's breezy desire to keep things light means Spike's treatment of his mental health problems feels somewhat shallow. They stage the famous incident when Milligan — in a fit of paranoid delusion — broke into Scllers's house and threatened to kill him with a potato-knife. That often-told anecdote always ends with the same punchline from Sellers: "What are you going to do — peel me?" It's a good joke, neatly brushing away a complex, troubling moment. Here, it brings down the curtain on act one. A more daring script might have imagined what happened next.

Any Goons fan will enjoy this cosily conventional tribute to a very un-cosy, unconventional talent. But something weirder might have been a more fitting tribute to Milligan, who died 20 years ago this month. I'd love to see an enterprising theatre producer take on his postapocalyptic fantasia The Bed-Sitting Room, for instance; the world might finally be weird enough to handle it.

TRISTRAM FANE SAUNDERS

"Spike by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman pays tribute to his talent in the best way possible — by being very silly indeed... John Dagleish is great in the central role, giving Milligan a gangly charm but also a restless, driven quality that makes plain the whirling mind that is both his gift and his torment... a genial and affectionate tribute"

SARAH HEMMING

For those of us of a certain age, the 1950s was the decade of The Goon Show. Avid radio listeners when few had televisions, we were used to comedies like Ray’s a laugh, Life with the Lyons and Educating Archie. The Goon Show was completely different: madcap, zany and a breath of fresh air.

Spike concentrates on the complicated life of Spike Milligan, the genius behind The Goon Show. His was the responsibility for writing most of the scripts and meeting the deadlines. A Pagliacci character, always ready with a quick joke, he was also a workaholic and suffered from anxiety and depression, not helped by the injuries he suffered during the war; memories that returned to him in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Written by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman drawing on their personal memories of Milligan and receiving its world premiere at the Watermill, the play covers the development of The Goon Show and its ups and downs, Milligan’s constant battle with the BBC bosses and his marriage to long-suffering June (Ellie Morris).

John Dagleish in the title role captures the essence of the character in all its complexities. As his co-conspirators Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers, Jeremy Lloyd and George Kemp give strong performances but don’t quite manage to bring out the nuances of the originals.

Robert Mountford was excellent as the posh BBC executive, Milligan’s nemesis who really didn’t get the Goons. James Mack played the show’s main producers Dennis Main-Wilson and after his departure Peter Eton. Two quite different characters with Eton strongly in favour of the Goons and suggesting changes that helped to increase the show’s popularity. He accurately described Milligan as a ‘petulant schoolboy with a pathological distrust of authority’.

Margaret Cabourn-Smith had a delightful role as the techie sound-effects person, giving us a hilarious guided tour of their evolution from gramophone records to tapes, along with Foley demonstrations thanks to Foley Sound Consultant (that’s not a title you’ll often come across in a review) Ruth Sullivan.

Add to that two delicious cameo scenes with Mack, Cabourn-Smith and Mountford as critics talking nonsense about The Goon Show. And Archie Andrews makes an appearance as the famous ventriloquist’s dummy (ask your grandparents) with Mack as Peter Grough — sorry, Brough.

If this all sounds confusing, it is. But that’s the Goons for you.

Designer Katie Lias’s minimalist quick-change set was perfect for the crazy action, all brought together under the skilful direction of Paul Hart.

I wasn’t sure about this production at first, but it soon won me over. It’s a comedy on top of a serious story about the life of an extraordinary man. Go and see it if you’re a Goon Show fan — the nostalgia will do you good. Go and see it if you don’t know about the Goons — you’ll learn something interesting.

PAUL SHAVE

Laughter rolls through the stalls at Spike's Newbury premiere

In a play full of wit, energy and charm, there are a few lines in Spike that stand out. This was one of them and it seemed to sum up Spike Milligan rather well.

Clearly ahead of his time with his unique brand of anarchic humour, the sense of struggle, both personally and professionally was deftly woven into the script. Cleverly staged, it runs at a breathtaking pace in the first half.

The narrative weaves between Spike’s creative craziness and struggles with mental health, which is brought into sharp focus as the play lurches from present Goonery to past darkness suffering from shell shock in the war.

John Dagleish in the title role puts in a huge and exhausting performance, channelling the comic insanity of Milligan as a sensitive, troubled and somewhat cantankerous soul. He is utterly watchable, as Spike takes a flourishing nosedive off the cliffs of respectability, and mashes up his haunted past to create the comedy of the future.

George Kemp plays the conceited Sellers to a tee, capturing the aloof arrogance – and almost having the audience cheer with laughter when Goon character Bluebottle makes an appearance in the second act.

Jeremy Lloyd plays Harry Secombe – the jolly Welshman who blows a lot of raspberries and frequently breaks into song – as a friendly, and perhaps kinder character than both Sellers and Spike.

The supporting cast keep the momentum going, with Robert Mountford’s BBC Executive as pompous and entitled as you might expect compared to the occasionally lunatic Spike.

Special mention goes to the irrepressible sound effects lady, Janet, played by Margaret Cabourn-Smith.

The geekiness of the BBC sound effects library scenes offer a different and highly entertaining tilt to the Goons’ comic rockets and while the play is set in the 1950s, in an age before women were considered funny, these scenes deflect from an occasionally bloke-y script.

Spike is well worth a watch and it is a deserving reflection on the contribution Spike and the Goons made to British comedy culture.

There are many laugh aloud moments and some great Goon voices.

The roll call of comedy hall-of-famers inspired by Spike listed out at the end says it all. From Monty Python to Reeves and Mortimer, it’s an impressive list. Shame no female comics made it though. French and Saunders would have been a good nod.

NIKI HINMAN