Theatre review: The Comedy About Spies

Mischief Theatre return to the London stage, and to their trademark incredibly literally-titled shows with The Comedy About Spies, a 1960s-set espionage spoof that sees Soviet spy Elena Popov (Charlie Russell) stake out a London hotel to meet a British double agent who's going to hand over state secrets. She prefers to work alone but she's been given a partner in Sergei (understudy Niall Ransome,) who's way too invested in his own cover story as a spleen doctor. Trying to stop them making the exchange are CIA agent Lance Buchanan (Dave Hearn,) who's accompanied by his mother Janet (Nancy Zamit,) who wants to ensure he doesn't get his cover blown again like in every other mission. Meanwhile hotel manager Albert (Greg Tannahill) thinks all the suspicious behaviour is because a mystery shopper is in the building to assess him.

Caught in the middle are guests Bernard (Henry Shields,) who's followed his girlfriend Rosemary (Adele James) to a conference to propose to her, unaware she's planning to dump him; and actor Douglas (Henry Lewis,) who's auditioning for James Bond and might have a chance if he can remember how the line "the name's Bond, James..." ends.

Regular readers will both know I enjoy watching Mischief shows a lot more than I enjoy reviewing them, because there's only so much you can say about a solid two hours of incredibly silly jokes, the vast majority of which hit the mark. The biggest slapstick setpiece here features the stage split into four hotel rooms, with the constant running around of the inept spies and spy-catchers gradually doing so much damage that characters are falling through the floorboards into each other's rooms.

I also enjoyed a running gag in which the hapless Douglas keeps being revealed in the hotel's laundry room, his attempts to wash his own jacket resulting in increasingly surreal accidents, and for all the budget these shows now have there's a gleefully lo-fi payoff to Lance tangling himself into every room in the building with a bungee cord. Although Matt DiCarlo's production rightly focuses on the laughs, an unexpected higlight comes in how genuinely stylish David Farley's Art Deco set looks.

But the true star of Lewis and Shields' script is the opening scene - to the point that if there's one big problem with The Comedy About Spies, it's that it starts on such a high it's hard to match it. This is a scene set in MI6, where the agents all being named after letters of the alphabet causes endless confusion. It's a setup that must have been tried in dozens of sketch shows over the last 60 years but it's just pushed so far and to such good effect it scales Two Ronnies heights of wordplay. The show's worth seeing for this "pre-credits" sequence alone, but do stick around for the rest of it.

The Comedy About Spies by Henry Lewis and Henry Shields is booking until the 5th of September at the Noël Coward Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Matt Crockett / Mark Senior.