Bring me sunshine
MORECAMBE By Tim Whitnall Theatre tour
Morecambe — a one-man show touring England until July — is a good night out. Often it can be hard to fully recommend a play, but this is one occasion on which it can be done.
It takes the audience through the life of Eric Morecombe, describing how he and Ernie Wise got together and became household names for over 20 years. The evening is peppered with Morecambe and Wise quips, songs and familiar routines. Ernie appears as a ventriloquist’s dummy, which works very well. It is humorous, informative regarding Eric’s life, but ultimately quite challenging. Eric had a heart problem but kept on working despite two major heart attacks. What drove him to do this? It wasn’t the money. It was rather that his work as an entertainer had come to define him — the funny man the crowds adored — and he couldn’t stop performing.
In some ways the evening is an apt illustration of everyone’s life outside of Christ. For Ernie, the show had to go on. But death claimed him, as it must do to everyone — poignantly, in his case, just at the end of yet another show. However much happiness he brought into people’s lives, the shows — and that happiness — were merely temporary.
