Spymonkey are a physical comedy theatre group that mix clowning, a hint of naughty Monty Python and just plain old slapstick to great effect.
The troupe is clearly very talented: Petra Massey’s physical ability is awesome and the comic timings of Aitor Basauri and Stephan Kreiss are impeccable. Toby Park is the straight-man, giving the proceedings some much needed grounding. Having said that, he does do a great bit of ballet.
This time around Spymonkey has created a show based on the gothic pulp novella. A young, orphan girl moves into a grand old house in Northumberlandshirehampton, where a reclusive writer has lived alone with his butler since the death of his parents and twin brother. What follows is love, insanity and strange dreams with mysterious characters. Cooped is a gothic spoof with Spymonkey’s own special brand of humour.
It seemed apparent that to fully enjoy this show you needed to share Spymonkey’s distinctive sense of humour. The show seemed to struggle deciding whether to be an original piece of narrative theatre or a pure parody. Though there were definitely amusing bits in the hour-long show it lacked a sense of continuity and flow as it dithered between the genres.
The somewhat forced interpretation resulted in far-fetched explanatory dream-scenes and overdone, enlightening monologues. I did enjoy the random song and dance numbers, but more because it seemed completely disjointed from the piece. They were just absurd. The two dream-sequences that are shoe-horned in as vital story-elements are easy laughs: culture and race spoofs needs to be hilarious, otherwise it feels a little cheap.
Spymonkey absolutely do great gags, particularly well done were the ongoing jokes about the lack of props and sets. The different characters in their outrageous costumes (or again, lack thereof) were great. Though each actor was fully committed to the role they were still able to laugh at themselves: Forbes Murdston trying to kiss the Bishop’s ring is a simple yet very effective demonstration of physical clowning.
I walked away thinking that though I really liked Spymonkey, I am not sure if Cooped really worked.
