Finally, Mischief Theatre may have found a show to match the frenetically daft wit and precise physical comedy of their breakout hit The Play That Goes Wrong, now in its 13th year. The Comedy About Spies is a 60s-set espionage farce full of misadventures and misunderstandings and packed with pratfalls and gags, some laboured but many hilarious. The plot is about as convincing as a Walther PPK made of blancmange, but that’s not really the point.
In a central London hotel, Henry Shields’s dorkish baker Bernard Wright (“I’m in bread!”) hopes to propose to his banker fiancée Rosemary Wilson (Adele James). But he’s constantly distracted, first by the upstairs caperings of orotund actor Douglas Woodbead (Henry Lewis), who’s there to audition for the role of James Bond but is best known for a hemorrhoid commercial (“oh crumbs, my bum’s come undone”).
Then there’s a useless mother-and-son CIA team and an equally hapless pair of glutinously-accented KGB spies who repeatedly try to recruit Henry until he’s (I think) a sextuple agent. The McGuffin is a set of plans for a superweapon, codenamed Project Midnight, which an unidentified turncoat plans to hand over to the Russians.
Bugged radios and booby-trapped steaks are switched around like a game of find-the-lady, flailing bodies crash through windows and floors, and there’s a marauding pigeon trapped in a wardrobe. Alongside the impeccable slapstick (for which the stage management team deserve as much praise as the cast) there are relentless running gags involving Russian agent Sergei’s cover as a spleen doctor, American spook Lance’s conviction that successive bottles of Shiraz are rigged to explode, and Henry’s baking-based misapprehensions. He thinks the CIA stands for the Cakes and Iced Buns Association, the KGB for the Kent Bakers’ Guild, and so on.
The character of Woodbead is a magnificent, overblown, booming caricature, who pronounces 007 as “oooh-seven” and M as “Mmmm”. Lewis pairs him with an MI6 boss in the opening scene who has given his staff alphabetical codenames, leading to much confusion among agents, U, Y, O, I and C when their homonyms come up in conversation.
Mischief’s artistic director, Lewis co-wrote the script with Wright, and there are many of their fellow founders – who all studied together at LAMDA – and trusted regulars from previous shows in the cast. Dave Hearn’s elastic Lance, Chris Leask’s strangulated Sergei and Greg Tannahill’s fey hotel manager all delight – Tannahill also choreographs the fights. Nancy Zamit and Charlie Russell bring coarser grain to the roles of Lance’s mother Janet and Sergei’s eye-rolling partner Elena. James, a newcomer to the Mischief fold, plays it admirably straight as Rosemary. Director Matt DiCarlo keeps the pace up and David Farley’s simple set nicely recalls the backdrops of 1960s animations.
Mischief has a diehard following that’s stuck with them through Peter Pan Goes Wrong, The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, Mischief Movie Night and the deeply unimpressive Groan-Ups and Magic Goes Wrong, which together kicked off an ill-fated residency at the Vaudeville in 2019. I confess I’ve previously been baffled by the appeal of their broad, knockabout humour, even in PTGW, which I saw some years and several cast-changes into its run, when it seemed technically proficient but tired, its jollity forced.
The Comedy About Spies features similarly cartoonish levels of gurning and mugging to augment the physical horseplay and as already mentioned the plot is pure nonsense. But it made me laugh out loud more often than just about anything else I’ve seen in the last 12 months and the characters are charming and winningly delineated. The fans will love it: I and other sceptics may be converted.
Noel Coward Theatre, booking to Sept 5; mischiefcomedy.com
