In 1992, long before Michael Barrymore came out as gay, and his marriage collapsed, and a dead man was found in his swimming pool – effectively ending his career as the king of prime-time TV – Spike Milligan was a guest on his chat show, Barrymore. "He was slumped in his sofa looking across at me, and he suddenly says: 'You know what, you're off your chump.' And I said: 'That's rich, coming from you.' It was a bizarre interview. I never found out what he meant."
Sixteen years later, Barrymore is playing Milligan in Richard Harris's Surviving Spike, which is based on the memoirs of Milligan's manager for nearly 40 years, Norma Farnes. We're in the Paddington offices of Bill Kenwright, who is producing the dark comedy two-hander as a try-out for a possible West End transfer. Barrymore is sporting an inch of grey stubble, "which is Spike, not me. It's a first, horrible. I have to shave every morning, working or on holiday." But he's relaxed, and relieved to have got the lines at last for a part that has him on stage for two hours, in a play that two months ago he knew nothing about.
It was only in December that he was finally told he would not face any charges over the death of Stuart Lubbock during a wild party at his Essex home in 2001. Shortly before hearing the news, he was at a private dinner with friends, who included his manager, Laurie Mansfield, and Kenwright. Kenwright persuaded Barrymore to do his party piece, an aimless conversation in the gobbledegook of "Professor" Stanley Unwin's invented language, "just mucking about".
"Suddenly Bill turns to Laurie and says, 'That's our Spike.' I said 'What?' and he just told me not to worry about it, he'd got a script he'd show me some time. A couple of days later it turns up with a note saying: 'What do you think?'"
For Barrymore, life is predetermined – "there's no such thing as coincidence, no such thing as luck" – and this is merely the next phase of his cycle. "It was just about whether I thought I could do it. It wasn't till three weeks later I thought, 'How do I get out of it?' Then you talk to your mates, don't you?"
His mates are people like the producer Jeff Pope, who created the only television drama Barrymore has done, Bob Martin, a late-night sitcom for ITV about a chat show host whose off-screen dramas outplay his on-screen performances. It ran for two series, ending at about the time the Lubbock affair was driving Barrymore's career onto the buffers. "Jeff's advice was not to take any Spike baggage into the part," Barrymore says. "I'm not him."
Barrymore's childhood as Michael Kieran Parker in the high rises of Bermondsey is chronicled in his 2006 autobiography, Awight Now: Setting the Record Straight. He developed a comic persona as a way of laughing off his father's drunken antics, meandering home at dawn, drunk, under the watchful eyes of all the other flat-dwellers. "You made it not matter by being funny, and if you can make people laugh they'll forgive you anything."
He decided at eight that he wanted to be a comic actor and got elocution lessons from a resting performer in the neighbourhood, and it was that actor who got Barrymore through his audition for Lamda, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. At 19 Barrymore's Malvolio won him a scholarship, but already stand-up comedy was beginning to take over and he didn't return to the stage until 2006 when he took on the regional tour of Kenwright's production of Scrooge the Musical, which had already been in the West End with Tommy Steele.
"It's a classic, beautifully written with 11 numbers, but although I don't like to be influenced by how other people perform a part and I'll do my version of it, it's not a new piece. I felt I managed to get the best Scrooge that I could." After that he returned to New Zealand, to be with his partner Shaun Davis, but when that relationship ended he returned to London. This is his first work since then.
He sees parallels between himself and Milligan. "We're similar, we've been through a lot of the same things, but he goes too far sometimes, and on stage even I can't believe some of the things I'm about to say..." Barrymore doesn't suffer from the bipolar disorder that had Milligan in and out of hospital throughout his life, but there are the manic episodes in private life, the difficulties with life partners, and the reliance on outside means of support – in Barrymore's case, drink, drugs, rehab and psychotherapy (all of which he says he is now clear of).
Barrymore met Farnes, who still runs Milligan's affairs , at the Bayswater office block they shared with Eric Sykes. She always put Milligan before herself, Barrymore says. He would lock himself away for days and once even gave her a pistol to shoot him with, but she would patiently wait for the depression to pass. He couldn't say sorry, and instead would go to extremes of generosity. He once signed away his army pension to someone he didn't know who wrote to him with a problem. "You're thinking, why is she putting up with this? She must have really loved him."
Farnes reminds Barrymore a lot of his wife Cheryl – they were divorced in 1997 and she died of cancer in 2005 – the crucial difference being that Farnes wasn't married to Spike, he says. "I remember Cheryl saying to my first agent: 'Why can't he just act normal when he's off stage?' He said the reason people like me do what they do is because that's who we are, normal doesn't come into it. There's a line in the play where Norma asks why Spike likes trees and kids, and he says it's because they don't expect him to make them laugh all the time."
He sees similarities with Milligan in his approach to performance, too: "It's that mind that can take you to extraordinary places and make people very happy and forget about yourself. There can be all bedlam happening off stage – I've been there – like when Spike found out that his wife Paddy had cancer and he went straight out to do a live performance as if nothing had changed. You go out of the darkness into the light and do one of the best things you've ever done, come back off and go: 'So where were we?'"
Barrymore is playing opposite Jill Halfpenny as Farnes. "She's good, very strong, but two days into rehearsal she came up to me and said she didn't think she liked him. I thought, 'blimey, I must be getting something right.'"
Unlike with Scrooge, Barrymore is getting the first try at the script and he knows how important first impressions can be. Does he feel he'll have failed if Surviving Spike doesn't make it to the West End? "I don't think that far. All that scares me at the moment is getting the lines right."
One senses that he feels relief at not having to come up with unscripted one-liners; the largely self-imposed stress of relying on his own resources to be funny is gone. Already more stage work has been suggested – though he won't say by whom – including even Shakespeare, and a return to the Twelfth Night role that started him off at Lamda. "You get to thinking, 'hang about, I'm 55, wasn't I suppose to be an actor?' And it's come around."
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Surviving Spike', Theatre Royal, Windsor (01753 853888), today to 16 February
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