Theatre review: The Frogs

I've seen two previous shows from Spymonkey, the veteran physical comedy troupe who tend to be a lot more hit than miss. Even if I wasn't seeing it on a quiet Monday night their latest show would come across as a little less full-on than the others though, as it comes with an added element of melancholy as the established quartet is now a duo: Petra Massey has left the company and Stephan Kreiss died suddenly in 2021, so there's an added significance to the remaining pair of Toby Park and Aitor Basauri tackling Aristophanes' The Frogs, itself written in reaction to the death of a beloved theatrical figure. That figure is Euripides, the Greek tragedian who'd died a year before Aristophanes premiered this parody of a heroic quest. With him gone Dionysus, Olympian god of drama (Park) thinks theatre is doomed, and decides to get him back.

Theatre review: The Complete Deaths

Just in case you haven't been paying attention - not just to this blog but to anything even remotely theatre-related - 2016 marks 400 years since the death of Shakespeare, and many companies (not the National) have been marking the occasion. They've mostly been doing this by staging his plays, which to be honest they do all the time anyway so it's not been altogether noticeable. Physical comedy troupe Spymonkey, though, have come up with a more fitting tribute to a morbid occasion with The Complete Deaths, which runs through the 65 deaths Shakespeare wrote (there's more than that in the canon, but for the purposes of this show only onstage deaths count) in a single evening. The framework is the classic comedy device of a company not quite on the same page, as Toby Park opens the show by announcing that after 18 years of silliness Spymonkey really need to go in a new, more serious direction and use these fictional deaths to explore dark realities.

Theatre review: Oedipussy

The word "silly" could serve as the full review of Spymonkey's Oedipussy, which opens with the cast of four lamenting a negative review of their previous show. Having been criticised for being too frivolous for their age (the cast are in their forties and fifties) they announce they'll be taking on the much more serious topic of classical Greek tragedy. But Sophocles probably didn't have this in mind as the company's take on the Oedipus myth is frantic, ridiculous, and very funny. Aitor Basauri, Stephan Kreiss, Petra Massey and Toby Park, a multinational cast with seemingly no embarrassment threshold, spend the next couple of hours strutting around in nappies, taking on all the characters and coming up with endless physical comedy and creative use of props.