The Guardian

More theatre about theatre. But in the case of this recklessly, tear-inducingly funny show no one in his right mind is going to complain. What we get is both a joyous recreation of Morecambe and Wise and an acute study of the emotional and professional interdependence on which any double act relies.

The Observer

It's the velocity and variety of the action, nippily directed by Kenneth Branagh, that makes audiences weep with laughter. A piece of scenery crashes down on to Foley's head - and miraculously becomes molten, draping around his shoulders like a cape. Foley assures McColl that the quality of laughter that he provokes is - being inaudible - the most sophisticated; he plays a crackling record of a long-ago solitary titterer: 'You can build on that.'

The Daily Telegraph

If anything, the gags and vaudeville routines come thicker and faster here than they did in the original shows, and the production is also curiously affecting. McColl has a lovely aggrieved innocence, and the moment when he is persuaded that he is the comic genius of the act because he gets the most sophisticated laughs - the silent laughs - brings a tear to the eye that isn't entirely the result of guffawing so hard.

The Times

Hamish, in a way that's almost diametrically opposite to Ernie, is funny on his own. His sweating, twitchy, rat-like hysteria, with faint overtones of gay, is just as compelling as Sean's idiot-savant Morecambe and, indeed, Toby Jones's technique of playing every character like a gin-soaked Truman Capote pretending to be Mickey Rooney. You basically end up getting three Eric Morecambes, and Ralph Fiennes dressed as a lady, for your money.

I never was very good at maths, but, by my calculations, it's coming in at 96 per cent genius.

London Evening Standard

To see Fiennes's stiff, prim star personality plunged into the hectic vulgarities of McColl's melodrama, with its dungeon, guillotine and skeletons, is bizarre fun. Declaiming random gobbets of Shakespeare and Dickens, Fiennes clings to seriousness while anarchy reigns and at curtain call staggers on like some exhausted Shakespearian. He's just the first of the surprise guest stars - another follows on tonight. But though Foley and McColl are brilliant slap-stick pranksters, their Morecambe and Wise routines are strictly for their legions of afficionados. The likes of Fiennes will provide necessary first-aid and reinforcement.

The Sunday Times

It is even more of a treat to find that, like Morecambe and Wise, Foley and McColl have persuaded a real celebrity to enter the hall of mirrors and suffer the humiliations heaped upon him. Ralph Fiennes did the honours on the first night, and we are promised a host of celebrities to follow. The celebrity casting of Kenneth Branagh as the show's director should help, but they will need weekly rehearsals if the script is to be as skilfully adapted to each personality as it was to Fiennes's.

Fans of either - or both - double acts will love this show; doubters may find it a little short.

It is a triumph, as Eric might have said of Ernie, small but perfectly formed.