Spyski (or The Importance of Being Earnest) (From Daily Echo)

Spyski (or The Importance of Being Earnest)

11:47am Thursday 26th March 2009 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

IF a play which begins as an Oscar Wilde classic and moulds into a tale of espionage sounds a little bizarre, that’s because it most certainly is.

Arriving at The Nuffield, you are handed a programme which leads you to believe that you will be seeing The Importance of Being Earnest, but don’t let that fool you.

The play starts just as you’d expect with a cucumber sandwich scene in a fairly conventional – if comically bad – take on Wilde’s classic.

Then a man in the stalls, who has looked rather suspicious from the start, begins to receive noisy radio messages and starts waving a gun around. Algernon, Jack, Gwendolen and CO then announce that they are no longer acting and the man in question is in fact a high-ranking spook – who they promptly accidentally kill.

What follows involves a sinister plan by the British Government and Russian experts to use genetic engineering to create a nation of wellbehaved citizens.

The Peepolykus company bring us an absurd spoof where cleverly Spyski turns out to have many parallels with The Importance of Being Earnest.

The play is at times witty, at times infantile, at times confusing and at all times really very silly.

It was a little bit too silly for me, but was very well received by a tittering Nuffield audience.