‘Vodka martini.” “Shaken?” “Yes, but I’ll be fine.” If groanworthy jokes of that calibre float your boat, The Comedy About Spies, set in early 1960s London, will be plain sailing. Even if they don’t, that needn’t put you off: the new show from Mischief, the company behind the smash-hit … Goes Wrong series, also offers farce, slapstick and multiple callbacks. So much of the script relies on linguistic misunderstandings (sweet/suite, need/knead, etc) that even the most tolerant viewer may become homophone-phobic.
The nonsense, orchestrated by director Matt DiCarlo, kicks off immediately with secret agents confusingly named after letters of the alphabet (“Not U – you!”). We then jump to the art deco lobby of the Piccadilly Hotel where MI6, the CIA and the KGB are trying to get their hands on the mysterious Project Midnight. Among those caught up in the tangle of mistaken identities are a milquetoast baker and a blustering thespian hoping to be cast in Dr No as “Ooh-Seven”.
A predisposition to the gag-rate of Airplane! will boost enjoyment, though The Comedy About Spies is fast-paced enough to make that film seem positively Beckettian. I was crying helpless tears of laughter within the first five minutes, and at several other moments throughout, not least during a line about a haunted leaflet that would take a paragraph to explain. The damp-squib gags tend to be eclipsed by the dynamite ones, with a single exception: a vulgar running joke about a veteran CIA agent thrilled by the prospect of a threesome with her own son rather sours the jolly mood.
David Farley’s doll’s-house-style cross-section set, which splits the hotel into colour-coded quarters in the first act, is glorious, but his designs grow fussy and over-dressed in act two and leave one craving the ingenious minimalism of Operation Mincemeat. The depth of emotion in that similarly silly show is also absent here, making The Comedy About Spies a more mechanical endeavour. Except, that is, for actor and co-writer Henry Lewis’s poignant final line reading, which bestows dignity on to a character (the Bond wannabe) who has been a buffoon throughout. This time, there were tears in my eyes for a different reason.
At the Noël Coward theatre, London, until 5 September
