THE COMEDY ABOUT SPIES • LONDON
★★★★★☆
Photo: PR-foto.
REVIEW THE COMEDY ABOUT SPIES: BRILLIANT COLD WAR SLAPSTICK IN LONDON
After ten years of thunderous West End success with the comedy hit The Play That Goes Wrong, the phenomenal British theatre group Mischief is back with a brand-new show. The Comedy About Spies keeps an enthusiastic audience in an iron grip of jubilant laughter from start to finish. Drop in and let yourself be spanked by brilliantly executed Cold War comedy until you die of laughter!
The Comedy About Spies is English action slapstick comedy at its best, performed by a top-notch cast at a lavish pace and with fabulous timing.
The story is a delightful pastiche of the Cold War spy genre, as you know it from James Bond and spy writer John le Carré, with various references to contemporary spy films and thrillers.
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The plot is classic. Plans for a new superweapon that can win the Cold War have been stolen. Now agents from the KGB, CIA and MI5 are colliding in London in search of the documents, which are believed to be in a brown attaché case somewhere around the fictional Piccadilly Hotel.
The story is complicated by several unsuspecting minor characters who cause everything to go haywire within two minutes.
A self-important Orson Wells-like actor bearing a striking resemblance to Frederik Cilius is rehearsing lines for a James Bond casting, which prompts a series of suspicious statements that set two hopeless KGB agents listening in the next room on the case.
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Staying downstairs is a biscuit baker from a small English town who has invited his girlfriend for the weekend to propose to her. A proposal from a henpecked hero, whom she has of course long since figured out and is trying to avoid at all costs.
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The hotel’s four rooms are presented simultaneously in a kind of comic strip set design, and it doesn’t take long before the characters fall in and out of windows and burst in and out of doors if they don’t crash through the floor from one floor to another or trip over each other in the reception.
It sounds corny, but I promise you: Spies is hilarious and has received rave reviews in the British theatre press.
A plot summary would be pointless, as the twists and turns in the hunt for the missing weapon plans are as crazy as they are endless, and I don’t want to spoil anything, because of course not everything is what it seems in the spy business.
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Henry Lewis, artistic director of Mischief, has teamed up with Henry Schields to create a wonderful script, where one brilliant one-liner after another has the audience in stitches. Laughter storms through the surprisingly large Noël Coward Theatre in SoHo, which seems to have been filled to capacity since its premiere in March and will certainly be so until its planned end in September.
If you’re a comedy fan, this is definitely a show worth travelling for. Buy seats close to the stage so you don’t miss a thing, because the lines fly through the room at breakneck speed. Five huge stars from Got to see this.
