The Bed-Sitting Room

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The Bed-Sitting Room is a satirical play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. It started off as a one-act play which was first produced at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. This was adapted to a longer play which was first performed in 1963 at London's Mermaid Theatre, it was a critical and commercial hit, and was revived in 1967. A film based on the play was released in 1970, although this was less successful. The film was directed by Richard Lester and the cast included Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Michael Hordern, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe and Milligan himself. The screenplay was adapted by Charles Wood.

The play is set in a post-apocalyptic London, nine months after World War III, which lasted for three minutes and forty-seven seconds - 'including the peace treaty'. Nuclear fallout is producing strange mutations in people; the title refers to the character Lord Fortnum, who finds himself transforming into a bed-sitting room (other characters turn into a parrot and a wardrobe). The plot concerns the fate of the first child to be born after the war.

The film is set on the third or fourth anniversary of a war which lasted two hours and twenty-eight minutes.[1] The absurdity of the film extends even to the settings. One scene is shot besides the pile upon which a British pottery firm has tossed its damaged wares for centuries. The joke is that an actor is looking for a dish that isn't broken. Another set of the film is a mock triumphal arch made of appliance doors, beneath which a Mrs. Ethel Shroake, the closest in line for the throne, is mounted on a horse. Even the closing credits have a touch of the absurd, listing the cast not by appearance or alphabetically, but by height.

The Bed-Sitting Room can be compared with Milligan's previous Goon Show, but with a savage, cynical and even more surreal edge, and an existential despair; one critic memorably described it as being 'like Samuel Beckett, but with better jokes'. It may have been in part, lampooning Aldous Huxley's pessimistic 1948 novel, Ape and Essence.