Review: THE COMEDY ABOUT SPIES, Noel Coward Theatre

Has there been a British comedy franchise as successful as Mischief’s since the days of the Carry On films? While The Play That Goes Wrong is still going strong in the West End and New York, their latest The Comedy About Spies rolls off the conveyor belt at the Noël Coward Theatre.

Quite what the urbane playwright would have made of this production is impossible to tell. After a highly animated but clichéd opening sketch that reeks of Abbot and Costello or Airplane! 2, what little plot there is gets poured out: in 1961, the CIA and KGB are converging on a hotel with both on the hunt for a rogue British agent and information on the mysterious Project Midnight, a weapon so powerful that it could end the Cold War. 

Gung ho CIA agent Lance (Dave Hearn) is determined to make up for his (many) past failures and so it doesn’t help that his mother (Nancy Zamit, playing a former spy) decides to join him on this crucial mission. Opposing him, Charlie Russell is the resourceful Soviet agent Elena who is stuck with the eager-but-dim Sergei (Chris Leask). Thrown into the mix are a romantic baker, his ambitious girlfriend, a suspicious receptionist and an actor preparing to audition for the upcoming role of James Bond.

David Farley’s set design is typically Mischief, especially once the initial art deco hotel setting gives way to an inventive dollhouse-like cross section of four rooms. This means that, not only can we track multiple storylines, but we can watch the spies sneaking around the rooms by rappelling through a window or bluffing their way in.

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.

Even without the usual input from Jonathan Sayer on board, the script from Henry Lewis and Henry Shields very much still feels like a Mischief one. Gags are thrown out like bullets from a Gatling gun, many hitting their target and there’s slapstick aplenty thrown in. This isn’t a typical …Goes Wrong in which we watch a bunch of am-dram actors trying to bring a production together. Instead, it resembles more 2016’s The Comedy About A Bank Robbery where a group of supposed professionals gather together for a particular job.  

The script alone would make this comedy stand out as a brilliant spy spoof ranking alongside the criminally underrated Top Secret!, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and Casino Royale (the 1967 film, not the 2006 one) and some way above the likes of Johnny English and any variety of Get Smart. There's the odd anachronistic references (high fives weren't popularised until gay black baseball player Glenn Burke and his colleague Dusty Baker slapped palms in 1977 and assassination by umbrella was first publicly seen around the same time) and not enough period detail to set the time. The real genius in the writing, though, comes with the creation of side characters who make the whole enterprise much more entertaining. 

One example is Lewis’ Douglas Woodbead, a struggling thespian best known for his appearance in haemorrhoid ads and for playing King Lear in The National Theatre bookshop. When not getting confused with a cricketer of the same name, he bumbles about misreading the script (“ooh-seven”) or mangling classic Bond lines. 

Another character with ambitions is the baker Bernard (played by Shields) who plans to propose to his girlfriend Rosemary (a sterling Adele James). She suspects Bernard’s plan but is not too keen on the idea of marriage. Not knowing her feelings or why she feels that way, Bernard pursues her hand despite the best efforts of both pairs of spies to (albeit unintentionally) get in the way of true love.

As might be expected, the silliness is off the scale and the lexicon of laughs is explored every which way. There’s some excellent punning, running jokes and fantastical physical feats (one poor puppet deserves an award for the punishment it gets put through every night). Every possible source of humour is mined good and hard and yet it feels that - with the exception of the opening sequence - no barrels are being scraped.

Even if A Comedy About Spies is not a major evolution of their formula, it suggests that these standard bearers for modern farce have yet to run out of creative steam. Their upcoming Christmas Carol Gone Wrong is much-anticipated but, in the meantime, carry on, Mischief, carry on.

A Comedy About Spies continues the Noël Coward Theatre until 5 September.

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