Finally, Mischief Theatre may have found a show to match the frenetically daft wit and precise physical comedy of their breakout hit The Play That Goes Wrong, now in its 13th year. The Comedy About Spies is a 60s-set espionage farce full of misadventures and misunderstandings and packed with pratfalls and gags, some laboured but many hilarious. The plot is about as convincing as a Walther PPK made of blancmange, but that’s not really the point.
In a central London hotel, Henry Shields’s dorkish baker Bernard Wright (“I’m in bread!”) hopes to propose to his banker fiancée Rosemary Wilson (Adele James). But he’s constantly distracted, first by the upstairs caperings of orotund actor Douglas Woodbead (Henry Lewis), who’s there to audition for the role of James Bond but is best known for a hemorrhoid commercial (“oh crumbs, my bum’s come undone”).
