Bring me sunshine.('The Play What I Wrote')

The big hit of this theatrical season in London is the quick-witted comedy team The Right Size -- the lanky Sean Foley and the stocky Hamish McColl, who scored Off Broadway a couple of years ago in a bit of slapstick merriment called "Do You Come Here Often?" Now, at the Wyndham's Theatre, they are back at their stock-in-trade with some cunning hokum entitled "The Play What I Wrote," a sort of anti-homage to the late, great English double act Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, who teamed up in the early forties and who, from 1954 to 1984, primarily through a variety of television shows, corrupted the English public with a pleasure that made them among the most beloved comedians of the postwar era. The show -- which includes nonsense songs, surreal dance numbers, a visit from a mystery guest, and the staging of a terrible play ostensibly penned by McColl ("A Tight Squeeze for the Scarlet Pimple") -- takes its energy and much of its shape from the arsenal of Morecambe and Wise's genial flimflammery, and it brings the antic spirit of English music hall into the twenty-first century.

"There are funny lines, but no funny men," Eric Morecambe told Kenneth Tynan in 1973. But Morecambe, who died in 1984, was a funny man. He was tall, bespectacled, rambunctious, and swift. Rubber-legged, he had the extra advantage of looking goofy in almost any costume, especially a posh one. He had the clown's rogue gene. Wise, who died in 1999, did not. He was short, conventionally good-looking, and somewhat vacant. Where Morecambe was incorrigible, Wise was sedate. Light needs shadow to intensify its brilliance, and so it is with comics, which is why Dame Edna employs the deadpan Madge, and the blowhard Oliver Hardy was partnered by the Milquetoast Stan Laurel. Wise's pretensions to artistic and intellectual authority impelled Morecambe to take liberties; his gravity showed off Morecambe's grace. In other words, Wise was the prose that allowed Morecambe's poetry. Everything that Morecambe touched with his exaggerated gestures -- his thick black glasses, his hat, the curtain (especially the curtain) -- became an occasion for zany upstaging and for an exhilarating mockery of decorum. Together, like all great comedy teams -- Martin and Lewis, Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello -- Morecambe and Wise cut a risible silhouette: they were a collection of physical and psychological opposites, which combined to present the world with a single comic psyche.

The brashest and most interesting conceit in "The Play What I Wrote" is that neither of the contemporary clowns wants to be Wise; both vie to be the madcap, scene-stealing Morecambe. The opening of Act II simulates the finale of the long-running TV series "The Morecambe and Wise Show," with Foley and McColl in top hats and tails dancing backward down neon-lit stairs to the signature tune "Bring Me Sunshine." When they turn to face us at the end of the number, both Foley and McColl are wearing Morecambe's black glasses. It's a great sight gag. "The Play What I Wrote" also raises the knotty issue of which member of The Right Size is funnier, who is the ticket and who the passenger -- an inevitable undercurrent both of a double act's curious symbiosis and of its neurosis. In this battle of nitwits, McColl, who apparently hasn't raised a laugh since 1997 (the legendary titter was caught on tape and is played for us), is the loser. He decides to throw in the towel and break up the team, which provides The Right Size with its own opportunity to send up theatrical artifice.

MCCOLL: Sean, I'm retiring from show business. FOLEY: You're only saying that to cheer me up. MCCOLL: It's true. FOLEY: Where are you going? MCCOLL: I don't know yet. FOLEY: Say your next line and find out. MCCOLL: Eastbourne. FOLEY: There you go.

But before he leaves, The Right Size -- with the help of Toby Jones, a pug-nosed jack-in-the-box who bobs up variously as the show's producer, David Pugh, Daryl Hannah, and the people of France -- manages some rollicking moments. As McColl gnashes his teeth ...