Twenty odd years ago, the theatre company Spymonkey were the darlings of Edinburgh Fringe and London, with hit production Cooped, leading to more success with the likes of Moby Dick and Oedipussy. Now Spymonkey return with The Frogs, their first production in more than a decade, which following a run at Royal & Derngate, is now playing at Kiln Theatre.
Things have changed in the intervening years; the foursome has been reduced to a double act, as Petra Massey is currently performing in Las Vegas and Stephan Kreiss sadly passed away in 2021. So it’s down to Toby Park and Aitor Basauri to face up to the future of the company.
Much like HOTTER Project’s The Last Show Before I Die, Spymonkey play out their own existential crisis on stage, with Aristophanes’s The Frogs merely a backdrop. The remaining company members are joined by Jacoba Williams who we are told has coerced Park and Basauri to perform the play in the hope of getting a place in the company.
Williams reminds them that The Frogs is the first ever play written for a duo (it is 3000 years old after all), so Park plays the Demi-God Dionysus, and Basauri his slave, Xanthius as they head into the underworld to retrieve the recently deceased Euripides. Williams plays all of the characters they meet along the way, and there’s a lot of them.
Smashing the fourth wall however, this version, co-written by Carl Grose, becomes a play within a play, or the ‘scenes in between’ as Spymonkey calls them. The gist of it being that Spymonkey are actually trying to bring back their friend Stephan Kreiss. It’s somewhat depressing at times as the company revisit their past to inform their future.
In true Spymonkey style, The Frogs is anarchic, messy and chaotic, but sometimes it also forgets to be funny. Lovers of clowning will enjoy some of the routines, while fans of the company will get a kick out of nods to their earlier work. It is at least a joy to look at thanks to Lucy Bradridge’s fantastic costume design.
It is a welcome return for Spymonkey, and on paper The Frogs looks like the ideal show for them to transition with, but ultimately it feels unfinished. Let’s hope the company is to have a future, and they can do so by bringing some of that bravery they were previously known for.
