Book made into a play

Spike Milligan’s comic novel Puckoon has been adapted for the stage for the first time.

The show – which has the blessing of the Goon’s family – is to be staged in London next year, after being developed by Northern Ireland’s Big Telly Theatre Company.

Milligan wrote the book in 1962, and it has sold more than five million copies to date, and a movie version was made in 2002 starring Sean Hughes and Griff Rhys Jones – but it has taken until now to be made into a play.

Director Zoë Seaton has called the result ‘The Goon Show meets Flann O’Brien meets Little Britain’ – and says Spike’s daughter Jane gave the company ‘a real insight into what Spike would have liked’.

Set in 1924, it details the chaos that ensues when incompetent Boundary Commission bureaucrats divide a fictional village – so half of it lies in Northern Ireland, the other half in the republic.

This production toured Ireland last year, when it was praised as being ‘Pythonesque’ and ‘oddball entertainment’.

It will visit 13 towns on both sides of the Irish in February and March, before a three-week run at the Leicester Square Theatre in March. Click here for full dates.

Here is a trailer:

Published: 20 Dec 2010