The Comedy About Spies review – Mischief’s Cold War caper has japes aplenty

Slapstick silliness is alive and well at the West End’s Noël Coward Theatre where Mischief’s latest offering has taken up residence. The comedy powerhouse company’s innumerable fans will know what to expect: running jokes repeated to the point of exhaustion, groanworthy puns (“have you seen Rosemary?” “the woman or the herb?”), high precision, athletic performances, and an air of unabashed bonhomie that makes the world seem like a brighter place for a couple of hours.

The Comedy About Spies features the regular team plus some of the trademarks of their earlier hit The Comedy About A Bank Robbery (cue bird puppets and mannequin stand-ins for the real life actor being lobbed about at moments of high hysteria) and the same sense of needing a bit of a ruthless edit. The laughs come thick and fast but the show could easily lose a couple of minutes from each act without seriously impairing the overall merriment. Still, it’s crowd-pleasing stuff, if seldom as inspired as the best of the  “….Goes Wrong” franchise that first put Mischief on the map.

A hybrid of farce and variety show (the first two scenes are expertly choreographed sketches but mere curtain raisers to the play proper), this hums along at a terrific pace but never draws breath to allow us to get to know or care about the characters involved. The only exception to that is co-author (with Henry Lewis) Henry Shields as affable baker Bernard Wright, trying to propose to his high-flying girlfriend (a wonderfully poised Adele James) but becoming haplessly embroiled in a battle of wits between American and Russian spies in 1960s London. Shields is reminiscent of a young Michael Palin, with a similar stiff upper lipped likability, and is a usefully sympathetic central figure.

Around him, all hell breaks loose and the timing and commitment of the company is faultless, even if theres little real tension. For the most part, the cast subscribe to the notion that the straighter you play the high stakes stuff, the funnier it is. Chris Leask and Charlie Russell are glorious, despite patchy accents, as the grimly determined Russians, and Dave Hearn’s all-American spy with a massive Achilles heel in the shape of his brash mother (an adorable Nancy Zamit) is suitably athletic and chisel-jawed, but essentially stony-faced to superb comic affect. Lewis delivers another variant on his signature role of pompous naïf as a clueless, fruity-voiced thespian in a perpetual, unsuccessful audition for James Bond.

The material is weaker than the structure and mechanics. Lewis and Shields clearly understand what makes great farce work, but could afford not to sling every funny idea at the wall to see what sticks, especially at this stage in their successful careers and with budgets and resources at this high a level at their disposal. It’s nice to see a non-musical with universal appeal arrive in the West End, despite a cringe-inducing running gag about threesomes involving close relatives that threatens to give a whole new meaning to the words “family show”. Elsewhere, the script is tamer yet, mercifully, funnier.

The Comedy About Spies looks splendid: Matt Dicarlo’s slick, occasionally ingenious production is very, perhaps excessively, scenery-heavy with designer David Farley conjuring up a gleaming Art Deco hotel with four rooms simultaneously on display, a moonlit rooftop, or a juddering tube train. The lavishness of the staging sometimes feels at odds with the makeshift jollity that is Mischief’s stock-in-trade. This is clearly going to be an enormous popular hit.