we had Toby always on the side of the stage doing an impression of the guest star that then quietly walks on to the stage from the other wing. Some got muted applause, some good applause and some huge applause. But if they were a massive name, then you got a momentary pause during which the audience is thinking, can this really be them? Roger Moore was in this last category and also Sting, Kylie Minogue, Ewan McGregor, and Richard E. Grant. Richard did the show lots of times, a bit like Roger. John McEnroe, of course, in the New York production, was massive. He just got it totally. You had Toby Jones at one end of the stage and John McEnroe at the other shouting out in New York whines: ‘No, I’m John McEnroe.’ ‘No you’re not—I’m John McEnroe.’ Brilliant. Those names named are some of the big highs of the two runs and the short tour we did with the play. There were times in that show I would turn to Sean and say, “Listen to that laughter because you’ll never hear it as thick again.” That play really was a laughter machine. It was like being at a rock concert, not a stage play!’
‘There were times in that show I would turn to Sean and say,“Listen to that laughter because you’ll never hear it as thick again”.’
After the play finished, Hamish and Sean did not immediately part company to pursue independent challenges. Quite quickly they went into a new stage production which reunited the whole The Play What I Wrote team of Hamish McColl, Sean Foley, Toby Jones, Kenneth Branagh (as director), and David Pugh (as producer). This was to be the maligned and ill-fated Ducktastic!
The main reason it failed, in this humble writer’s opinion, is because the title is truly dire. For my money, any play named Ducktastic! sounds more like something the Krankies would come up with. Remember them? Fandabidozi! It must, therefore, have been an uphill battle from the opening onwards—and there wasn’t too much ‘onwards’!
But Hamish McColl has his own theories. ‘I think we set the bar too high with The Play What I Wrote. The next production just didn’t catch on,’ he explained. ‘It was an expensive show to stage, and they didn’t have the time to bridge that gap between an average start and developing it into something a bit special. So it was pulled.’
My mind drifts back to the opening night of The Play What I Wrote, before Roger was ill, before Hamish and Sean misfired with Ducktastic!, and before the lovely and talented Toby Jones began scaling the heights as the big star he deserved to become (he won stunning reviews for his depiction of Truman Capote): this was the opening night of The Play What I Wrote on Broadway and it was clearly very successful with the audience, if a little confusing for the family, friends, and fans of Morecambe and Wise. At one point the names of Morecambe and Wise are replaced with those of Laurel and Hardy. Inevitably it was only what it could ever be: a goodish play well performed with a famous guest star each night. Maybe that would have been enough for Broadway if there had been no 9/11 and no war on Iraq.
The first-night party was a very New York affair—lots of money lavished upon a vast number of guests in a huge first-floor room just off Times Square—and you sensed the party meant more to the American side of the production than their British counterparts. There were paparazzi-style columns of photographers and TV news crews, and unbearably bright lights and loud, chattering voices trying to be heard through fixed Botox grins. As David Pugh pointed out, he would rather have seen the thousands of dollars they splashed out on partying go towards publicity. But that isn’t the way American backers and producers do it on Broadway. They want their party and mean to have it.
A few familiar faces were in evidence—Mel Smith (with whom I’d done a breakfast television slot some years earlier), Michael Palin, and Eddie Izzard—all of whom I liked enormously and who talked to me at length with great understanding of Morecambe and Wise.
The absence of the spirit of Morecambe and Wise—or the entire soul of the piece, as Hamish McColl puts it—from the new production was painfully emphasized by the fact that not once did the huge media contingent in attendance try to speak with my mother or show any remote interest in the London production which had generated the play’s presence on Broadway in the first place. It would be interesting to know what film-maker Steven Spielberg made of the New York production. Allegedly he was a huge fan and devotee of the original London production and instrumental in creating the Broadway opportunity.
Kevin Kline, possibly best known to British audiences as the villain in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, made a good opening-night guest star and did further nights, as did other guests, such as Liam Neeson, Meryl Streep, and Glenn Close.
The play was doing OK business until America invaded Iraq. What with the recent memory of 9/11 hanging over the country like the sword of Damocles and all Broadway productions suffering as a consequence, it was only a matter of time before audiences thinned and the first-night party was just a memory. On the fateful day of the invasion of Iraq, as the play went through its machinations, a man jumped up in the audience and shouted, ‘We’ve gone into Iraq!’, to which there was the kind of ‘Yee-hah!’ reaction that you tend to get when Americans are together in a relatively confined space. As Hamish said to me, ‘Talk about breaking the air of suspended disbelief! It took ten minutes to draw them back in.’
‘As the play went through its machinations, a man jumped up in the audience and shouted, “We’ve gone into Iraq!”’
David Pugh hung on in there for as long as possible as the show was up for an award, but, when it didn’t win, the cast and crew were soon recalled to the UK. The production was given immediate notice and, with a brief countdown to closure, they were six miles up in the sky and flying home.
It was an interesting rather than a commercially viable run—an exercise from which we perhaps all learned something, and I include myself here in my vague role as consultant to the project. And there had been time for one cheerful celebratory event before leaving New York: Kenneth Branagh married his girlfriend Lindsay. As Hamish McColl recalls, it was ‘definitely one of the high moments of the run…a great memory.’
One final personal memory: I remember taking my mother to look at the splendid Grand Central Station. I’d seen it used as a location in so many films, so to actually stand there and marvel at this iconic sight was a treat beyond all other treats. A lady travelling from the station, clearly uncertain of which platform she was searching for, marched briskly up to a cop—great using that word in its appropriate context—and said, ‘Oh, do excuse me, but could you tell me…?’
‘I’m sorry, madam,’ interrupted the cop, gently raising his hands and giving an apologetic shrug, ‘but I’m closed Sundays!’ Both of them laughed loudly at this, and it reminded me of years earlier when my father had just returned from one of those Ed Sullivan shows he wrote about in his diary. ‘I have to say the one thing that struck me is the native New Yorker’s sense of humour,’ he once told me. And now I got it first-hand.
The story of The Play What I Wrote didn’t end in New York. In April 2007 its nationwide tour of Britain—happily back in its original format—concluded. And that was with its third cast since The Right Size created and starred in the show.
I still get involved with the publicity for the play whenever it’s recast and up and running, occasionally visiting venues where it’s due to open to talk with the press about Eric and Ernie, and about the play, its history, its metamorphosis in New York, its changing casts, and, of course, its guest stars. Sometimes I did a Q&A session with David Pugh for the touring productions. We would sit on stage in front of an invited audience and David would tell the story of how it all came together and then turn to me and ask relevant questions about Eric and Ernie to which I would give lengthy answers. We worked up quite a little double act ourselves.
In
