UNFROGGETTABLE MOMENTS IN THE UNDERWORLD
Aitor Basauri does not need to be framed in a 20ft-high giant puppet frog in order to be funny, but blissful overkill is part of the pleasure of Spymonkey. Making the said frog try to swallow Toby Park while he plays “All of me” on the bass clarinet is likewise a mere grace-note, part of the finale of this curious piece. Like the sudden appearance, earlier on, of the Royal and Derngate community chorus tap-dancing , ribbit-ribbit-frog style, in violently greenish-yellow rain cagoules. Which causes a “psychotic flashback” interlude, with Park and Basauri huddling in the Spymonkey office negotiating hopefully with a billionaire Getty backer so they can to resume their post-Covid-post-Brexit greatness by adapting, with Carl Grose, a 3000-year-old play.
For they are and were Spymonkey, the greatest and most floridly nonsensical clown-trained comedy foursome. But in hard real life Stephan Kreiss died suddenly in 2021, and Petra Massey is off “on loan” doing cabaret in Las Vegas. These losses to a great extent inform the reason they are hurling their vaudevillean selves (as they did in Oedipussy) at Greek theatre by the father of comedy. The model is Aristophanes’ play relating the journey of Dionysius and his slave Xanthias, travelling into Hades to bring back the greater dramatist Euripides (a bit like the stumbling Conservative MPs struggling to revive Boris). They borrow the cloak of the hero Heracles, and are waylaid on the great dark lake by the chorus of scornful frogs .
The search at one point becomes one for Stephan, their lost friend, but without morbidity. Just feels like another part of the self-revealing courage that marks fearless trained clowning . We can laugh because they can. The mood betwen the two is of Toby the leader and Aitor the clever disruptive absurd sidekick: the Spaniard’s great bushy beard and flawless wise-fool expressiveness a foil to Park’s air of attempting commonsense and failing.
With them is Jacoba Williams, a bit of a find (not every performer can fit in with Spymonkey so beautifully). She – pretending to be the backer Getty’s ambitious niece – takes the other parts, several of which are wonderfully constructed monsters: I cannot get over the moment when as a many-headed guardian of Apollo’s cave she loses her temper and bursts several of her balloon heads. As Heracles, apparently naked in a tight muscle-suit with full dangling equipment and lion headdress, her scorn for the bumbling wanderers is magnificent, and so is her foiled attempt to deliver a TED talk about the meaning of this whole performance.
It is all very meta, and while I have always found Spymonkey’s disciplined larking a delight – selfconscious without being irritating, and painfully physically funny – some may be baffled. But try it for the ride: for the very silly self-operated revolve, the ridiculous costumes by Lucy Bradridge, the insane hippyish puppet-dance, Park’s moments of melancholy guitar strumming and Aitor’s tap-dance break. Enjoy. It’s all they ask. It transfers to the Kiln in london next..
Royalandderngate.co.uk to 3 feb
Kilntheatre.com. From 8 Feb
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