Theatre / Reviews
Review: Eric and Little Ern, Tobacco Factory
There’s a busy house at the Tobacco Factory Theatre with an appreciative and predominately silvery-haired audience who have come to see their beloved idols reproduced in the flesh once more.
On stage is some hospital equipment, a sofa and the endearing and enduring double bed, embodiment of the notion that British comedy icons Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise lived, breathed, ate and slept together, clown-style, so inseparable were they in the national psyche.
But this is a hospital bed, occupied by an ailing but spookily accurate-looking Ern, complete with trademark comb-over rug, while Eric paces in his equally trademark black specs and a white doctor’s coat, hamming with a stethoscope. We are clearly in the afterlife and about to embark on an extended reminiscence.
Eric and Little Ern is a show of two halves. The first is somewhat weighed down by its setting (the well-worn conceit of an afterlife reunion) and hampered by a script, created by its two performers, that doesn’t quite cut the mustard in terms of funniness and that needs to be pruned of odd lines and gags that fall flat.
The seduction factor lies in the novelty value of seeing these two on stage, because with the use of familiar gestures and phrases and from certain angles, Jonty Stephens and Ian Ashpitel are dead-ringers for Eric and Ernie, albeit fleetingly.
The second half comprises far more original Morecambe and Wise material, which is of such timeless quality that it almost stands up on its own.
Grieg’s piano concerto played on the back of the sofa (“You’re playing all the wrong notes!” “I’m playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order”), quick-fire repartee, the irresistible paper bag trick, and, best of all, a tap dance routine to Pretty Baby that movingly evokes the end-of-the-pier roots of their slow crawl to stardom.
It’s a curious phenomenon, the ‘tribute act’, involving a collective agreement to suspend disbelief, with the pay-off of seeing the departed (or long-disbanded) act conjured from the past in an approximation of real life.
Perhaps in the end its mostly best to let sleeping comedians lie and make do instead with thumbing through classic scripts (particularly the genius work of writer Eddie Braben) or browsing iconic sketches of ‘plays what we wrote’ on YouTube (Grieg’s Piano concerto and Cleopatra to name but two) to recapture the truly immortal essence of Eric and Ernie.
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