Stage-to-screen review: The Play What I Wrote

As usual January has some lulls in theatregoing that I'm topping up with filmed productions I missed the first time. and one BBC iPlayer offering leftover from the Christmas schedule seems a pretty appropriate choice for the time of year, even if it wasn't specifically festive: Morecambe and Wise were a comedy duo and beloved British institution, and particularly in the 1970s their Christmas special was always the most-watched show, fondly remembered to this day. (I'm sure it creates an annual bind for the BBC - if they don't show an episode they'll get complaints about breaking with tradition, if they do they'll get them about flooding the schedules with reruns.) I'm sure we did get a showing of the real thing, but a good compromise between new and old is this filming of the 2021 revival of Sean Foley, Hamish McColl and Eddie Braben's tribute The Play What I Wrote, inspired by Braben's original scripts.

Theatre review: Matchbox Theatre

Last year Michael Frayn published Matchbox Theatre, a short story collection in the form of playlets, meant to be read and imagined as they might play out; apparently it was greeted with comments that the collection would inevitably be staged for real some day. Hampstead Theatre used to have a Michael Frayn Space that his name got dropped from when it was rechristened "Downstairs," so maybe they felt they owed him something - it's in their main space, in its in-the-round configuration, that Matchbox Theatre has been turned into a sketch show, directed by Hamish McColl and with Esther Coles, Tim Downie, Mark Hadfield, Felicity Montagu, Nina Wadia and Chris Larner (also serving as composer) making up the acting troupe. After a rather self-conscious introduction, we get the opening sketch in which Hadfield and Montagu rise from below the stage as the statues on a tomb, their centuries' sleep disturbed by the trendy vicar holding a disco in the church basement.