"In The Play What I Wrote, Hamish McColl and Sean Foley (aka The Right Size) prove they can make us laugh at the weakest of silly British humour. Only their delivery matters. And New Yorkers desperately NEED to laugh. How fortunate this import opened right after Dubyah began his long-threatened invasion of Iraq. Here we sit, just waiting for terrorists to incinerate us, a few at a time or in crowds. My nuke pills – as the manufacturer dubs these potassium iodine doses – arrived on the day I got a gander at Roger Moore hamming it up as Mystery Guest Star and refusing to answer to the names Demi Moore and Mary Tyler Moore. I urgently needed something to distract me from counter claims about which side had killed civilians in a Baghdad marketplace and worries over my never having purchased a gas mask. Silly me! I had foolishly hoped our Supreme-Court appointed President might have continued to practice diplomacy until he mastered that art. Instead, he ignored the certainly of reprisals against the US population, and I risk mayhem on the NYC subway, where machine-gun toting National Guards and NYPDs hang out while doing absolutely nothing to prevent anyone from waltzing in laden with Sarin gas or explosives to spoil my evening.

As it happens, I made it alive to the Lyceum Theatre, where miraculously I laughed. I laughed at the ‘I’m Dreaming I’m Asleep’ song. I laughed at the timely ‘I am France, and parts of me are revolting.’ I laughed at Sean getting stuck in the flashback and at his ‘silly walks.’ I laughed at Hamish taking pleasure in generating an inaudible laugh, even though my laughter thundered all the way to Yonkers. Bless you, McColl and Foley, and Toby Jones, and director Kenneth Branagh, and even Roger Moore, who is so incapable of vaudevillian humour that the boys didn’t even roast him, but who rolled his eyes a little, as though to acknowledge that neither he nor the Scarlet Pimple play-within-the-play would threaten to replace Hamlet or Medea in our hearts. Bless you one and all for helping New Yorkers laugh while facing danger."