Everybody’s hot for Mischief’s new action-packed thriller THE COMEDY ABOUT SPIES, gripping audiences with laughter from April 2025 at the Noël Coward Theatre. The multi award-winning team behind The Play That Goes Wrong and The Comedy About a Bank Robbery step into 1960s London in this hilarious spy caper full of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and mistaken identity.
A rogue British agent steals plans for a top-secret new weapon. Spies from the CIA and the KGB assemble at London’s Piccadilly Hotel to track down the British mole and obtain the file. When a young British couple and an older actor auditioning for the title role in the first James Bond film check into the hotel, the stakes reach boiling point in this riotous world of Cold War farce.
__Assisted Performances:__
Audio Described - 6 June, 7:30pm
Captioned - 15 August, 2:30pm
BSL - 22 June, 2:30pm
In the midst of this invitation to bungle – involving covert bugged radios, overt communication failures and frantic excuses – stand the sweetly hapless figure of Shields’s Bernard Wright, a baker, vainly trying to propose to his girlfriend (Adele James’s Rosemary) and Lewis’s Douglas Woodbead, a loudly roaring failed actor, preparing to audition for James Bond. No less cherishable are Charlie Russell and Chris Leask as the only too conspicuous Russkies, while Dave Hearn and Nancy Zamit impress as the clueless (and, ludicrously, related) Yanks. In a knowingly wearying second half, the plot thickens with spiralling double-crossing guaranteed to have everyone, not just the tourists, struggling to keep up. I’d say it takes near genius to fashion something this incorrigibly goofy.
What could easily have come off the rails is majestically held together by Matt DiCarlo’s razor-sharp direction. Lines snap with a military precision, the action sequences have a real zip about them and the most tender scenes draw genuine emotion. The finale to act one is a series of farcical decisions and mistakes which somehow coalesce into a masterpiece of co-ordinated chaos; to paraphrase Sir Terry Pratchett, this show’s most memorable sequences only happen because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
| 2025 | West End |
West End |
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