Following in the vein of 2016’s The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, Mischief Theatre – they of The Play That Goes Wrong – are now aiming their slick brand of ever-escalating theatrical farce at the spy genre in this West End premiere. When a top-secret file is stolen by a turncoat British agent, a deeply mismatched pair of KGB agents and a CIA operative and his over-enthusiastic mother collide in pursuit of it – along with an over-the-hill actor and a young couple – at the Piccadilly Hotel in London in swinging 1961. General chaos ensues.
Writers and original Mischief Theatre members Henry Shields and Henry Lewis mine plenty of daft comedy from spy staples like bugged radios and improbable gadgets while paying homage to a decade in the UK rocked by the revelations of double agent Soviet Union spy rings. It’s low-hanging fruit, of course, but ramped up by Mischief Theatre’s trademark ability to spin seemingly minor mishaps into total comedy meltdowns.
Director Matt Dicarlo handles these set-pieces and Shields and Lewis’s penchant for fast-moving wordplay deftly, allowing us half a knowing wink before whisking us on to the characters’ next blunder. He’s greatly aided by David Farley’s set design, a colourful cartoon of ‘60s London. A split-level cutaway of the Piccadilly Hotel is a neat visual shorthand for introducing us to the characters and snappily showing us the chaotic consequences of a bugged radio being moved between rooms.
A talented cast know their mission, steering into every eccentricity in the play’s helium-filled parade of stereotypes. Lewis is a delight as buffoonish actor Douglas Woodbead, playing him with more than a pinch of Matt Berry, while Shields’s chirpy baker Bernard Wright – who becomes scene-stealingly pivotal to the plot as identity confusion reigns – is straight out of an Ealing comedy. Charlie Russell is also superb as a fanatical KGB agent, Elena Popov, exasperatedly landed with a dud partner.
This production rolls along like a slickly made fairground ride, with the machine-tooled humour of a company who have made this type of high-octane farce for a while now, with ‘spy caper’ a particularly apt vehicle. It’s often breathlessly funny, but there’s also a whiff of self-indulgence. Certain jokes sprawl over multiple scenes, bringing diminishing returns. However, for bungling wit matched with peerless physical comedy, you’d be hard pressed to find better in the West End.
