The Play What is Breaking West End Theatre Records
Three months ago The Right Size were an obscure double act, now they fill houses with their take on Eric 'n' Ern
The Guardian, 22 December 2001
It is the stuff of West End legend. Three months ago, outside the threadbare
world of fringe theatre, Sean Foley and Hamish McColl were not just poor and
obscure - they were poor and obscure and getting dangerously close to 40. Now
Hollywood stars are queuing up for the privilege of appearing on stage to be
mercilessly sent up by the double act known as The Right Size.
'The Play What I Wrote' yesterday broke the record for the highest advance ticket
sales of any play in West End history, beating the half a million pounds taken
by Alan Bennett's 'The Lady in a Van', starring Maggie Smith. And this from an
opening so unpromising that David Pugh, the producer who turned Yasmina Reza's
gentle satire on pretentiousness, 'Art', into the modern 'Mousetrap', was beginning
to doubt his Midas touch. "We had only £22,000 advance bookings which, if not
the worst ever in the West End, is pretty close to it."
But as soon as the first reviews and the first stories started to circulate of
people wetting themselves as the hilarity builds to a pitch in the second act,
the Wyndham's Theatre began to pack out. It has not been less than 98% full
since. Not bad for a show that Foley and McColl first did not want to write
never mind star in, putting Pugh off five years ago when he approached them
with idea to do something based on Morecambe and Wise.
And for once in the West End, a runaway success has not been about star power
either - although every night, just like the Morecambe and Wise TV specials of
the 1970s, there is the tease of who the mystery guest star will be. So far
Ewan McGregor, Richard E Grant, Jonny Lee Miller, Kenneth Branagh, Richard
Wilson, Jerry Hall, Sue Johnston and Maureen Lipman have obliged. Ralph Fiennes
agreed to do three, but has had such a good time he has actually appeared 11
times so far, and booked himself in for another stint in February.
"They are all the same," said Pugh, who has extended the run at least until
April. "Everyone wants to do it again and again." On Wednesday night Michael
Caine arrived unannounced and despite his legendary reluctance to tread the
boards again went backstage to ask how many days' rehearsals he would get.
Three hours, he was told.
It may also have helped that 'The Play What I Wrote' is directed by Branagh and
that nostalgia always fills more theatre seats than new talent. But the critics
are convinced that it is the inventiveness of The Right Size and their sidekick
Toby Jones, who appears in a bewildering variety of guises including Daryl
Hannah - "half woman, half kipper" - and as a pistol-waving member of the
Morecambe and Wise Appreciation Society (military wing), that is the real
secret of its appeal.
Their approach to the holy grail of double acts is not a tribute, or even a
skit of the Eric and Ernie's Christmas shows, but the real thing - only better.
Full of music hall tricks, in jokes and surreal goonery, it uses one of Ernie's
awful existential French revolutionary masterpieces, A Tight Squeeze for the
Scarlet Pimple, to play out the tensions that flare within a double act when
one person is so much funnier than the other.
While The Right Size may not have registered to a wider public, they are far
from unknowns, having won an Olivier award five years ago for 'Do You Come Here
Often?', a show about two men stuck in a toilet for 25 years.
In fact, the biggest irony of all for anyone who had watched the careers of
Foley and McColl is that 'The Play What I Wrote' is not their funniest work.
Earlier this year they toured with 'Bewilderness', about two men who disappear
down the back of a sofa, and were sometimes rewarded with audiences of up to
50. Seven years ago they appeared at the Edinburgh Festival with 'Stop Calling
Me Vernon', a show about two vaudevillians who cannot bear to leave the stage.
Two years ago they lit up the Almeida in Lee "Billy Elliot" Hall's adaptation
of Brecht's 'Mr Puntilla and His Man Matti'.
Pugh spotted their potential long ago and, having received the blessing of
Ernie Wise before his death, refused to be put off when the pair would not do
the show first time round.
"Eventually, I just gave them 500 quid and told them to go away and see what
they came back with. So they spent the weekend in this freezing church hall in
Highbury and worked on a few ideas, and when they let me have a look I nearly
fell off my chair laughing. I knew straight away we had to go into the West End
and I gave them the money to develop it."
The final piece of the jigsaw was getting Eddie Braben, the man who scripted
the Morecambe and Wise show, on board with about a fifth of the gags.
Foley and McColl met in Paris nearly 20 years ago when they were learning to be
clowns at the feet of Philippe Gaulier; they had to go home after a month when
they ran out of money.
The Guardian theatre critic Lyn Gardner said: "An awful lot of what they do
comes out of music hall routines and brilliant theatrical tricks they dream up
with their designer, Alice Power. So much of what they do is about warmth and
wonder, and although it is very postmodern too, with all those theatrical
in-jokes, it doesn't come across as pretentious." |