Review: Spyski! (or The Importance of Being Honest)
November 7, 2008
Date reviewed: 7th November 2008
Venue: West Yorkshire Playhouse
Having spent a month at The Lyric Hammersmith, the members of well-established comedy outfit Peepolykus (pronounced, they insist, “people-like-us”) have now brought their latest piece, Spyski! (or The Importance of Being Honest) to the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Courtyard theatre.
A glance at the programme both reveals and confuses: it is entitled The Importance of Being Earnest (Absolutely not Spyski!… no way… no spies at all). What comes across abundantly, however, is the company’s confidence. The goofy photographs and mock monologues in which the Earnest cast members digressively explain their suitability for their roles suggest little fear of failing to amuse.
The plot turns out to be a suitably speedy affair about an actor working on a production of Earnest whose rehearsal hours become encroached by his unexpected involvement in espionage. The comic potential of the overlap is harvested comprehensively, with the clichés of production line spy flicks referenced, and the self-conscious eccentricity of Oscar Wilde’s witticisms and the way they tend to be delivered parodied.
However, the extent of the plot’s conceptual shrewdness only emerges gradually. There are some endearing situational jokes at the expense of the acting profession or the fact of actors playing actors, and an intelligent manipulation of the situation to cheekily court publicity. John Nicholson, who plays the protagonist and co-wrote the play, has been one of Peepolykus’ artistic directors for twelve years, and his expertise at writing comic plays is obvious as much from Spyski!’s premise as its individual gags.
The use of the stage and set is similarly adept. This, along with the numerous costume changes, demands great energy from the five-strong cast, and is slickly executed. Opportunities for the production to ridicule its own budgetary and spatial limits are taken just about infrequently enough not to become tedious, and the set is repeatedly transformed for scenes by the insertion of items of furniture and changes to the lighting that, helped by a gaudy soundtrack, enhance the play’s comic effect.
Spyski! does not abandon the deadpan puns that are to be expected in a comedy play; these feature at quite regular intervals. Watching it, however, you rarely feel that it is dependent on them – they serve more to vary its humour than anything else, and contribute to the general impression of an appropriately disorderly stampede of jokes and plot.
Having been sceptical about Spyski! before seeing it because of what struck me as a tone of desperation in its title and programme, I leave the Courtyard converted. It’s easy to imagine that the best modern British comedy is all on television, stand-up or both, but Peepolykus flouts this assumption. Part of Spyski!’s appeal is that it capitalises on the situation of being performed in a theatre, and that it does so is testament to Peepolykus’ proficiency at what it does.
-Simon Walker
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