Spies Like Us’ production glides and clowns through locations, interactions and characters in no small part thanks to Ollie Norton-Smith’s movement and sound design (the latter with Oscar Maguire). Whilst Greene’s story is very much one of trenchant dialogue (thus lending itself so well to the classic 1959 film starring Alex Guinness), this rendition has a Beyond the Fringe revue quality to it. For the audience, it is a ride of jolly good fun and some impressive improv-style deployment of just a few vacuum cleaner parts serving as feather boas and canine creatures as much as the ersatz ‘secret weapons’ from which Wormold profits. With the performing troupe of four men and two women multi-rolling as everything from local informants, German assassins and the titular Man in Havana, James Wormold (played by Alex Holley) to airplanes and taxis – this team has a brilliant time whilst working up a sweat very fitting of a Caribbean climate. As such, much jaunty amusement does indeed ensue.ĭirector Ollie Norton-Smith creates his world without the aid of any stage sets and only the most limited number of props. Spies Like Us Theatre has seized the opportunity of a balmy pre-revolutionary Cuban setting inhabited by the British ruling class in its full absurdity to go all out with their physical theatre japes. Graham Greene’s political farce about a vacuum cleaner salesman turned bogus intelligence source-for-pay to the British Secret Services has always been a brilliant example of the hilarity that can ensue when obsessions and avarice meet.
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