The Times , 20 October 2005

By Benedict Nightingale

The Right Size’s new show has had its problems. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced that they were cross with Kenneth Branagh for using live ducks in his production. Again, the lead duck was stolen from its cage on Monday, although nobody knows whether to be cherished as an escaper or smothered with orange sauce and eaten. In any case, it didn’t matter, because the show went on yesterday with a competent understudy scuttling across the stage, pecking at trousers and looking happy enough to satisfy even Peta’s quack police.

It especially didn’t matter because ducks don’t play a vast part in this defiantly scatty, confusing show. The Play What I Wrote, which is the last piece staged by Hamish McColl and Sean Foley, alias the Right Size, was pretty clearly about Morecambe and Wise. This is about conjuring tricks, love, transvestism, the creation of the world and, glancingly, Daphne the long- necked duck.

Was it really Al Pacino’s voice that welcomed us to a mysterious universe and, later, "the backside of beyond"? The programme suggested so. In any case, the exuberant McColl came on at one point as a naked Eve, although also in clothes that variously suggested he was Liberace, a pharoah, a duckling, Ann Widdecombe and a girl about to be sacrificed beneath a volcano. Foley was more samey and less biblical, comically packing his spindly frame into a silvery suit that made him look like an eccentric cross-Channel swimmer, a high-class sperm or, as he suggested, an East German speed skater.

Am I losing you? That’s as it should be. Insofar as there is a plot, it involves McColl’s Christophe Ursula Sassoon, a not-too-brilliant magician, and Foley’s Roy Street, the Ports- mouth pet shop owner hauled up from the audience to help and, at one point, get shot from a cannon. The pretence is that they are preparing a Las Vegas-style show. Which is why an usherette is cut in half, her mother disappears down a hatch to canoodle with someone called Derek near the Taj Mahal, and her husband runs riot, ending up dressed as a Turkish pasha.

All this, and more, comes with puns, double entendres, verbal cock-ups and silly jokes galore. Of Fred Astaire: "Ginger Rogers is his assistant", "Ginger does what to ’is assistant?". Of that impending sacrifice: "I am a damsel in distress and I hate dis dress". McColl has said that he is "fascinated by people in desperate situations trying to do the right thing"; but that’s over- serious given the pier-end feel that develops.

It all finishes, as maybe it should, with the cast in Broadway togs on Broadway stairs galactically singing "Why are we here? Duck knows, duck knows". I’d like to say that by then the show had cracked me up, but it didn’t, quite. Quacked me up a bit, that’s all.