WELL WORTH THE MONEYPENNY
This is glorious: just what we all needed. In the company’s spirit of never wasting a terrible joke, I absolutely Bond-ed to it. Following Mischief Theatre with devotion, ever aince their 2013 Play that goes Wrong was born I have joyed in their disciplined but clownishly fearless tactic of mixing up half a dozen comic genres – from silly to satanically-subtle – and rattling them at you till you’re helpless. So here is top physical slapstick and terrible puns, knowing parody and determinedly dumb farce, a dash of character-comedy, fast patter and Wodehousian absurdity , all in bucketfuls of pure energy. And it’s a happy thing to see four of the Mischief founders out there in person, co-author Henries Lewis and Shields, Dave Hearn and Nancy Zamit.
This time, under New York director Matt di Carlo, they take on the irresistible world of spy films from Bond to Smiley, setting it all in 1961 and opening – just to limber us up – with a Whitehall office scene with the magisterial Henry Lewis as M thoroughly summoning and confusing single-letter colleagues In a blinkingly rapid vaudeville moment, ending by explaining that the code is just there “for ease”, whereon four E’s storm in. Then it settles into the main plot. Two Soviet agents are Charlie Russell as Elena, scornfully omnicompetent, and Chris Leask as Sergei, who works ceaselessly and hopelessly at living his cover ‘legend” as British Dr Tim (“a spleen expert”). Vieing with them to stop a traitor handing over a deadly secret is the CIA man, Hearn as Lance Buchanan , and OMG he has all the gestures, crouching to expected explosions then shouting “Clear!”. He is living down various failures, not helped by the arrival of Zamit as his possessive ex-spy Mum, always up for a kill-mission and prone to reminisce about other legends of the trade “sucked a bullet out of his thigh, that was a great party”. Meanwhile the innocents (or are they?)who tangle with the spies in a hotel are Adele James as Rosemary and her boyfriend Bernard – Shields does a wonderful Wodehousian nitwit – and Lewis as a pompous actor who has come to audition for the first Bond film. And, of course, thinks the Americans must be from the studio.
Soon – in David Farley’s expensively brilliant set – there is a two-storey Battenburg-cake of four hotel rooms where they all plot, misunderstand, bug one another, and spectacularly fall through floors and out of windows (Mischief is athletically brave). Jokes at every level from complex to asinine come at you rapidly, and in the second half there is much neon spectacular, plenty of blink-and-you-miss it background jokes, rapid running, personal hopelessness, brilliantly choreographed fights and sly cultural jokes: you have to love it when a character who’s escaped from being trapped in a washing-machine says he’s still “a little giddy from the revolution” . The Soviets nod, aren’t we all..
Enough. It’s wonderful. Mischief at their best, as finely worked as clockwork and exuberant as toddlers.
delfontmackintosh.co.uk. to 5 Sept
Rating 5
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