Review: The Comedy About Spies

The comedy starts before The Comedy About Spies has even begun. Walk into the Adelphi auditorium to Frank Chacksfield’s Spice of Life and you’re instantly in the Sixties — all Catch Me If You Can cool — and doing the Mashed Potato in your seat.

Which is exactly where Mischief Theatre wants you. Set in 1961, this raucously funny, clever and joyously old-fashioned spy caper barely gives you time to breathe once it gets going.

The Comedy About Spies is Mischief Theatre at its best. It takes the Cold War world of MI6, CIA and KGB agents, secret files, double agents and preposterous gadgets and gives it the full Mischief treatment.

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There is something wonderfully reassuring about comedy this unapologetically daft. At times it feels like The Two Ronnies at their most ingenious, particularly with the wordplay around agents U, O, Y etc— say them aloud and you can see where this is going.

Then there is the physical comedy. The timing of the exits and entrances is nail-bitingly accurate, helped by a fabulous set — a posh hotel stacked like a cube of rooms, where actors disappear through one door only to pop up through another, or suddenly through a window. Or in a washing machine.

A moving walkway works wonders for the frantic spy-chase sequences but is even funnier when hotel receptionist Greg Tannahill rides past completely stationary, randomly playing the saxophone.

Best of all are the stunt doubles. There isn’t even the pretence that we’re not supposed to notice the switch. They are so hilariously, deliberately obvious that on the night I saw it, even the actors started corpsing. Once they went, we went with them.

The company is packed with Mischief favourites and they are a class act. Dave Hearn is CIA agent Lance Buchanan, with Nancy Zamit as his overbearing mom Janet, while Russian spies Chris Leask and Bryony Corrigan do the accents — and the lying — terribly(excellent).

Mischief co-founder Henry Shields has been my daughter’s crush for some time, and as swooning numpty Bernard Wright he is adorable, with the audience collectively aahing every time something goes wrong and he disappoints his girlfriend Rosemary (Adele James).

Mischief artistic director Henry Lewis plays Douglas Woodbead, an actor who arrives in London hoping to become James Bond. Except Lewis was off the night we saw it and, while I would never doubt his comic prowess, Adam Byron had enormous fun stepping up and was more than worthy of the opportunity. You really have to see it to understand quite how hilarious the mispronunciation of 007 can be.

The show is clever without ever needing you to admire how clever it is because you are too busy laughing.

I honestly can’t remember an evening at the theatre when I had more fun. So much so that afterwards we went to the stage door to congratulate them — and discovered what a brilliant bunch they are offstage too. I want to make some Mischief with them myself.