Fizzing with charisma

Morecambe
Duchess

Red
Donmar

Peter Kay: ‘I’ve never met a person who didn’t at the very least love Eric Morecambe.’ Hello? Peter? Over here. I remember Eric and Ernie during the 1970s and they were as entertaining as a power cut. Perfunctory, passionless mother-in-law jokes. Semi-funny puns pouring out like weak tea. Nursery-rhyme repetition everywhere. The catchphrases. The trick with the paper bag. Eric slapping Ernie’s cheeks. Endless jibes about Ernie’s hairy legs and his playwriting ambitions, even though both gags were non sequiturs: we couldn’t see Ernie’s legs and we knew for sure he wasn’t a playwright because he was too busy being the country’s richest unfunny stand-up. Their bland, innocuous comedy of reassurance didn’t travel well. America sent them packing. Their films bombed. The oft-quoted stat that 28 million of us watched their 1977 Christmas Special conceals the fact that the other 28 millon of us had better things to do.

So the Eric Morecambe tribute show arrives in the West End laden with assurances of its brilliance. I found it unexpectedly captivating. Bob Golding’s performance fizzes with charisma and bonhomie. The impersonation is absolutely uncanny. Look up there. Eric’s back. He isn’t dead. He’s in the room with all his tricks and shuffles, his winks and twinkles. All the jokes have returned from the graveyard as well. An ambulance goes past, siren blaring. ‘He won’t sell much ice cream going at that speed.’ Fairly amusing. Sort of. Oh, all right, then, funny.

To the Donmar Warehouse for a bio-drama featuring the conceptual painter Mark Rothko. Heard of him? Here’s a clue. Whoops, I’ve dropped another gallon of ketchup. That Mark Rothko. This play is about painting, or rather about the remnant of painting we call ‘modern art’. Before photograpy destroyed draughtsmanship, artists were labourers, odd-jobbers, innovators, scientists in the best sense, philosophers with dirty hands using the materials of the universe to enhance our understanding of it. Until the second half of the 19th century, painting was a vague and happy alliance between technique and meaning. No one cared at what point a piece of representative art rose from the literal to the metaphysical. But once craftsmanship became obsolete this started to matter a lot. It became paramount. Divine inspiration was everything suddenly, because there was nothing else. Every artist had to pose as a genius or face being dismissed as a water-colourist, a weekend doodler, an easel weasel painting pretty sunsets. Artists declared war on craftsmanship. Sadly they won. (Writers tried it, too, but after Finnegans Wake, the worst book ever published, they hastily and blushingly signed an armistice.) Crucial to the artist’s new status was his strategic decision to shift the burden of elucidation from himself to the viewer. ‘Don’t ask me what it means. I commune with the godhead, earth-dweller, you explain it to me.’

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James Pete

January 7th, 2010 10:32pm Report this comment

Lloyd Evans, I like your writing and your enjoyment of the theatre.
But really, are you trying to dumb it down to us, what with this "they were so trite but now they've changed, gotten better in fact!" while holding on to your gripe, not yours actually but Joe Sixpack's, that Rothko is self-deluded simply because he provides no program with his painting that you might look at the Meaning.
If that's all you want, have The Spectator email it to you.

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