We’re here to see the world’s oldest comedy: that’s what Aitor Basauri and Toby Park, the two remaining members of the physical comedy company Spymonkey, tell us in this adaptation of Aristophanes’s ‘The Frogs’ which is very clever, very silly, very self-aware but not always as funny as it promises to be.
Aristophanes’s 2,500-year-old comedy follows the pompous god of theatre Dionysus and his fall-guy slave Xanthias as they go down into the underworld to bring back Euripides, the greatest playwright of all time. It was full of nods to Greek theatre of the time, in-jokes and fart gags, and adaptor Carl Grose’s update captures that really well.
We’ve got straight-man Park as Dionysus and deadpan clown Basauri as Xanthias, but they’re also playing themselves as they talk us through the reasons for staging ‘The Frogs’. It’s a complicated conceit, but essentially we get a show which, at any one moment, is a version of ‘The Frogs’ that’s faithful to the original in spirit and plot, as well as a play about Spymonkey staging ‘The Frogs”, as well as a play about Spymonkey the company itself.
Once a troupe of four core members, Petra Massey ‘went off to Las Vegas’ and Stephan Kreiss died in 2021, leaving just Park and Basauri to figure out what the company is in its current form. The third cast member, Jacoba Williams, playing all the other parts, encourages them to embrace being a duo by turning to the world’s first double act, Dionysus and Xanthias.
In a lot of places it’s very faithful and very funny. Some pleasingly homemade props and costumes by Lucy Bradridge turn Williams into various Stygian monsters, while a lilypad revolve provides lots of physical comedy moments. Instead of jokes about Aeschylus and Euripides, there are jokes about theatre producer Sonia Friedman and director Peter Brook, and other contemporary references. Basauri’s bearded Xanthias is definitely the highlight; his incredulity each time he realises that a part is being played by Williams - ‘it’s Jacoba again!’ - is a consistent laugh.
Where the production excels is in being exactly what ‘The Frogs’ was: a broad comedy that echoes and mocks worries about contemporary theatre. It’s all staged by director Joyce Henderson with a sense of chaos, much of which is controlled, but there’s a messiness that creeps in, too, which makes it all a bit harder to follow and swallow.