The Right Size

The Right Size was a British theatre company active from 1988 to 2006, led by Sean Foley and Hamish McColl. Their major success was The Play What I Wrote, a tribute to Morecambe and Wise, and other key productions included Do You Come Here Often? and Ducktastic.

Foley and McColl have frequently been reported as saying that they met in Paris around 1987 when they were learning to be clowns at the school of Philippe Gaulier (with both leaving after a month when they ran out of money). But it seems more likely they met earlier at Oxford Youth Theatre. They formed The Right Size in January 1988. The name arose when working on their first show, which was originally titled The Right Size. When they decided to change the name of that show to Que Sera, they kept The Right Size as their company name. McColl said this was because they "liked everybody's aspirations to be the right size."

From their earliest shows, such as Que Sera, The Bath, Flight to Finland and Moose, The Right Size often tried out productions at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe or London International Mime Festival, and then toured in the UK, Europe and internationally, sometimes in collaboration with the British Council. The shows were devised by Foley and McColl with their collaborating co-performers and creative team. "I grew up by creating my own work," Foley said later. "Nobody was going to give me a job, so I created one myself by creating a theatre company, The Right Size. On the first show my partner, Hamish McColl, and I built the set, drove the van, did the show, took the set out, went to the pub."

They were described early on in terms such as "one of Britain's most promising young clown theatre companies" and "[t]he multilingual clowning theatre company [that] specialises in brash physical comedy that is part mime, part slapstick and can just about be traced back to the traditions of the commedia dell'arte". McColl, commenting later on 1980s trends in "physical theatre" based around schools such as those of Philippe Gaulier and Jacques Lecoq in Paris, said, "The difference for us is that we hitched ourselves more to vaudeville and variety. We like to see ourselves as much in that tradition as in the explosion from France."

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