The return of The Play What I Wrote to the West End was a red-carpet event. The foyer was teeming with stars: David Suchet, Eric Idle, Twiggy, Eddie Izzard and even Angela Rippon, presumably there to relive her moment as a Morecambe and Wise starlet.
Up on stage, The Play What I Wrote was as fresh and funny as last time around. Sean Foley did his gangly, rubber-necked shtick with the kind of heavyweight energy that usually comes to men only after the fourth pint; Hamish McColl was all wounded pride and puppy-dog eyes. The show is conceived as a homage to one double-act (Morecambe and Wise) through the eyes of another, but this was a three-hander: Toby Jones stole every scene he was in.
The first act took a little time to get going, but you wouldn't have known it from the reaction of the audience, who laughed like drains every time Foley did his goggle-eyes-and-buck-teeth thing. Even the performers seemed taken aback by the warmth of their reception.
It is the second act that explains The Play What I Wrote's presence in the West End, and that lifts Foley and McColl above the field of quite-good fringe acts. The set - an illuminated stairway, flanked with perfect BBC light-entertainment wings - struck the right note of nostalgia and cheeky parody, and the double-act dynamic was focused in a way that was missing from act one. By the time the special guest star - Roger Moore - came on, they were home and dry. Moore walked through his part with stately good humour, and even attempted a little song-and-dance number in full Marie Antoinette drag, which seemed to be as much a surprise to him as it was to the audience.
What is most gratifying about The Play What I Wrote is that it really shouldn't have succeeded, but it has. It is contrived, by dint of director Kenneth Branagh's pulling power, to harness the full wattage of celebrity to its advantage - but it remains at heart a simple, intelligent idea well executed, and that's not something you see every day, certainly not on the London stage.
· Until January 4. Box office: 020-7396 1736.
