Review
Review
Review: The Comedy About Spies
Mischief’s latest West End offering is a great night of light-hearted entertainment
The Noël Coward Theatre feels a fitting home for The Comedy About Spies, a new offering from Mischief, the people who brought The Play That Goes Wrong to the West End. There is a good degree of slapstick and quick verbal misunderstandings, including an opening scene where MI6 gets all turned around with an alphabet-based naming system for its agents. These are great entertainment in their own right, but the play hits its stride when enacting Coward-esque sequences that involve unfortunate circumstances and overlapping coincidences, all mounting into perfectly organised chaos.
It’s a tight script, and whilst many of the jokes may be familiar, they come together beautifully, each act reaching a satisfying climax of ridiculousness. There are plenty of strong performances – Henry Shields plays a delightfully hapless Bernard, a baker reluctantly roped into espionage. Nancy Zamit throws herself into Janet, retired CIA agent turned supportive mother – the only cast member who might be having more fun with their accent is Charlie Russell as straight-talking Soviet agent Elena Popov, whilst Greg Tannahill gets plenty of laughs as the overly effusive hotel manager.
Is it pushing theatre forward in any way? No – but why should it have to? The punchlines land hard, the plot unravels hilariously, and no one is having a dull time. A crowd-pleaser in every sense, The Comedy About Spies wears no disguise.
The Comedy About Spies is now playing at the Noël Coward Theatre – find tickets here
