>>REVIEW
COOPED
Spymonkey and One Yellow Rabbit
Runs until November 12
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Shitting mechanical pheasants, bollocks-naked ballet dancing, vaginally projected ping-pong balls – no, there’s nothing Spymonkey won’t do for a laugh in its uproarious (if uneven) Cooped.
The madcap European troupe has clearly honed its comic talents in the fringe-festival milieu, where you’ve often got to be as outrageous and ridiculous as possible to grab attention. For this expansion of their 2001 Edinburgh Fringe hit, the gang and director-co-creator Cal McCrystal have taken a cellophane-thin spoof of gothic romances and stuffed it to bursting with sight gags, silly accents, daft dream sequences, inspired slapstick and hilariously incongruous musical numbers, to the point where it loses the shape of a genuine genre parody. Which is a bit of a shame, really, since these four gifted performers seem equally capable of witty character comedy as well as broad physical clowning.
The show has a Farndale-style framework: a writer with the deliciously Dickensian name of Forbes Murdston (Toby Park) has penned a homage to the gothic novella, to be performed by himself and three others: an actress-benefactress (Petra Massey), a severe-looking German expressionist actor (Stephan Kreiss) and a puffed-up Spanish soap opera star (Aitor Basauri). These thesps may not be rank amateurs like the Farndale ladies, but they’re a bunch of egotists and hams all the same, and the benefactress certainly didn’t splurge on their rickety décor and props, which could have been designed by Ed Wood Jr.
The moth-eaten play-within-a-play is a loony riff on Rebecca, seemingly set in the swinging ’60s, to judge from the wide-eyed heroine (Massey), a blond dolly-bird who flounces about in a turquoise micro-mini-skirt and white go-go boots. She’s Laura du Lay, a poor orphan come to Birch End (nice S&M name, that), Murdston’s ancestral English country manor, to serve as his private secretary. Her broodingly handsome and mysterious employer lives alone, save for a wildly unpredictable German manservant named Klaus (Kreiss) and the usual heap of skeletons in the cupboard.
Enter the family lawyer, Roger Parchment (Basauri) – and if you had any doubt this was the ’60s, Basauri’s uncanny physical resemblance to Peter Sellers will put an end to it. Like Sellers, he also plays multiple roles, popping up later as Scotland Yard inspector Judadench and a wickedly mischievous bishop, as well as sporting an accent as ludicrous as Clouseau’s. "I must find ta killa!" the intrepid Judadench declares in his gazpacho-thick Spanglish. "You must find tequila?" asks an incredulous Klaus.
Basauri might purloin the show, if it weren’t for Massey, a consummate physical comedian whose pretty Laura suffers from some not-so-pretty flatulence, as well as jittery conniption fits that render her stiff as a board, leaving Murdston and Parchment to struggle awkwardly with her body as if she were a life-size, vibrating Barbie doll.
Then there’s Kreiss’s Klaus, the not-so-sombre butler, given to cavorting in a kaiser’s helmet and playing the drinks trolley with spoons – that is, when not joining Basauri and Park for the aforesaid nude ballet, a hysterically funny interlude where they prance about in ill-fitting fig leaves to the delicate strains of Handel.
The musical highlight, however, comes earlier, with a terrific faux-’60s pop song, sung and danced with all the cheesy slickness of that decade’s TV variety shows. And then there’s the Ang Lee-spoofing martial arts fantasy, and the one with kvetching 16th-century Russian Jews (which looks like a leftover skit from a Mel Brooks movie), and the video clips of the Basauri character’s spicy Spanish soap….
McCrystal and Spymonkey keep slathering on the nuttiness with a more-the-merrier philosophy that doesn’t always prove true – some of the bits aren’t as good as others and come off like daffy padding. And, finally, the show doesn’t so much reach a climax as run out of steam, with a final number, a Vegas-floorshow-style rendition of "Mr. Sandman," that’s more of a jazzy whimper than a full-on comic bang.
Spymonkey and its team – including production designer Lucy Bradridge – have loads of talent and Cooped is a showy vehicle for it, but now they need to scrap a few of its accessories and fine-tune the engine instead. |
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