Oedipussy review, Lyric Hammersmith

Truly kebabed

Spy Monkey productions are a mix of Houdini sleights of hand, bonkers props, stories that climax without any sense of journey, and humour that's like the Marx Brothers and Cambridge Footlights vying for primacy in a children's playground. Clever conceits have the cast slipping out of role to moan to the audience. It's full-on theatre.

For some, that's too much, as the handful of empty seats in the second half attest, but if you want challenging, original comedy, it doesn't come any finer. The action happens around a plain white set of pillars in which the cast is constantly getting jammed. This is one of the reasons the audience howls with laughter through what is a deeply moving tragedy in which the good hearted Oedipus unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother, Jocasta.

As Jocasta, Spy Monkey's sole woman, Petra Massey, is the queen of slapstick sex, a cross between Harry Worth and Jessica Rabbit. The priceless courting scenes are rich with physical and visual metaphors. The three men are Aitor Basauri playing assorted shepherds as well as both a king and a queen; Stephan Kreiss as a gambolling teenage Oedipus, finally driven to gouge out his own eyes; and Toby Park holding it all together as narrator and woodwind supremo.

In conclusion: What's extraordinary about Emma Rice's direction is that, despite the endless visual and physical jokes, the moments of high drama are genuinely tense and moving.  The troupe is on tour for another month - go see.

References
Spy Monkey tour details
Michael Coveney review in What's On Stage