Following the success of A Play About Space and A Show About Superheroes, Wellington-based award-winning theatre collective My Accomplice brings their latest show (about spies), Spyfinger!, to Auckland, following their Wellington season for the New Zealand International Comedy Festival. With incredibly (and necessary) detailed direction by collaborator Uther Dean; Alex Greig, Hannah Banks, and Paul Waggott mime their way through a convoluted yet intricate plot parody of the best and worst of the spy film genre. 

As with any great parody, there are homages abound in Spyfinger!, from including every James Bond film title through some form of wordplay, to the salaciously saddled femme fatale. [More]

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A Comedy Festival must see! Absolutely brilliant! This is not stand-up comedy; it’s theatre at its best and funniest.

As you sit there looking at the stage, pacing across it are three normal looking people: your entertainers for the night. The stage is bare, the lighting normal and the thought will cross your mind, I thought had come to a see a comedy show about spies. Where is the glitz, the glamour and most importantly the gadgets? Well don’t judge it so soon because your misconceptions will be blown away.

The My Accomplice team unite the spy thriller with the craft of theatre in a seamless way. They appropriate the common spy plotline and feature the usual suspects: the egotistic alpha male spy, his accompanying geeky tech crew, the mole, the evil genius, the sexy love interest and many more. Each of these characters is brought life by actors who have refined their craft. Their delivery from facial expressions, accents, personality through to action scenes is impeccable.

Paul Waggott, Alex Grieg and Hannah Banks will keep you captive with their high energy and eclectic performance. They navigate the stage with genius and creativity as they transport you from continent to continent. You’ll need to keep your eyes wide open because the action just keeps coming and so do the witty puns and punch lines. 

Go and check Spyfinger out! You’ll be enthralled by the performance and tears will be streaming down your face because these guys are seriously funny.

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My Accomplice’s latest offering, Spyfinger! – A Show about Spies, is a super-quick, super-witty, ever-loving pisstake of the spy movies we all love and love to hate.  Though there are nods to John Le Carre, Mission Impossible and the Bourne franchise, most of the references and the overall tone are drawn from the James Bond movies. 

Part of this might just be the Bond franchise’s knowingness, pulled off with varying degrees of success and archness by the different creative leads.  In Spyfinger, the dial of self-aware parody is turned up to 11.  The publicity material says it isn’t a parody, but I disagree – there’s even a great scene dedicated to the genre’s love for non-essential sex scenes. 

Spyfinger is a parody in the same way that Airplane is a parody of high-adventure movies.  First of all, it’s a darn fine piece of theatre in its own right.  Second, there’s obviously a ton of love for the source material stuffed into all the jokes.  Third, the insight that comes from the study of the source material is fed back in funny. Lots of it. 

Playing cinema genres in theatre doesn’t seem like it should work, but it does precisely because the approach is so lo-fi.  Instead of trying to dazzle us with all sorts of special theatrical effects, the three performers – Paul Waggott, Alex Grieg and Hannah Banks – dazzle us with intense physical commitment to everything they do, from slow-mo fight scenes and sound effects to acting out the visual tropes of spy movies: location subtitles, ridiculous security measures, villains and their lairs! 

While there are a few opening night stumbles, for the most part we’re back to theatre at its entertaining best: three people in a room, making us, their audience, laugh as a group.

And the show is funny.  The jokes-per-minute on this show is ridiculously high.  Dumb jokes, smart jokes, references, call-backs, dick jokes, sight gags, puns, trope jokes – it’s all in there.  There are a couple of comedy bits that feel more like director Uther Dean’s personal obsessions than related to the source material, like the lonely robot that makes a cameo and whose appearance seems only to slow down the play.  While entertaining, these moments don’t sparkle for me the way the genre parody does, but I’m honestly not sure if that’s personal preference. 

I just like the genre jokes so, so, so much.  Partly it is good writing.  The plot is ridiculous, and better for it.  The whole show is structured on a series of increasingly clever and improbable callbacks, whose resolutions both show up spy movies’ love of early throwaways, and leaves you in awe of the layers at play. 

The whole show is just fun, and it makes me wish more people were making genre theatre, especially if we get more stuff like Spyfinger!

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