The Stage

Morecambe

Published Friday 11 December 2009 at 11:40 by Jeremy Austin

Tommy Cooper, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and now Eric Morecambe - it’s hard to imagine who of our current crop of popular comedians will be honoured with a posthumous West End play.

Of all, Morecambe was undoubtedly the most loved. The Christmas show in 1983 attracted more than 28 million viewers - half the country. Every British person aged 30 and over will have fond memories of Morecambe and Wise.

And in this fabulous two hours of wall to wall entertainment, writer Tim Whitnall and performer Bob Golding have managed to alchemise some of the magic of Morecambe’s performance.

The script is loaded with gags, the quick one-liners that the audience joyously recalls. “I am playing all the right notesÉ” says Morecambe. “But not necessarily in the right order,” the audience parrots back.

It is also artfully constructed. Otherwise lengthy pieces of exposition, such as when Morecambe, as plain Eric Bartholomew, is making a name of himself on the northern variety circuit, are given a poetic rhythm that carries them and the audience along.

Other times, Golding plays other characters - his Bruce Forsyth is possibly even better than his Morecambe - who serve to keep the plot going in the right direction.

But it is Golding who adds the final magic to the script. Guy Masterson, whose direction is exquisite here, says Golding was born to play Morecambe. And he was (and Alan Carr at a push).

His mannerisms, speech patterns, even ad libs capture perfectly the spirit of the man. The memories of sitting sated on Christmas Day in front of the nation’s favourite comedy duo come flooding back.

But he also manages the pathos well - when Morecambe’s parents die, when the press savages their first BBC appearance, their failure to crack America, his battles with a dodgy ticker (“Keep going, you fool!”) gently lift and drop the audience. But Morecambe was never vicious on stage or off it and these are more hillocks than the roller coaster ride of, say, Milligan’s life.

For fans of theatre, there is talk of Moss Empires, the Variety Artistes’ Federation, Lew Grade and the memory of a way of theatrical life that has long since gone. And with it, it seems, comedians who can truly call themselves the nation’s favourite.

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