The Stage

Oedipussy

Published Wednesday 8 February 2012 at 11:58 by Andrew Aldridge

The tone for Spymonkey’s reimagining of Sophocles’ tragedy is set from the off. “Did I kill my father?” asks Stephan Kreiss’s Oedipus. “Yes!” deadpan the three other performers in chorus. “Did I marry my mother?” “Yes!” comes the response.

Petra Massey (Jocasta) and Aitour Basouri (Laius) in Oedipussy at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton Photo: Johan Persson

The scene - more of a riff - is typical of a show that features two male performers running around in nappies and sandals, jokes that revel in their awfulness and a Chorus who sports a white, upside-down bin on his head. The results, as you might imagine, are utterly ridiculous - but frequently hilariously so.

There is nothing new in this kind of comic sabotage - Mel Brooks, Monty Python and the National Theatre of Brent all spring to mind - but that hardly seems to matter when the four performers (Kreiss, Aitor Basauri, Petra Massey and Toby Park) consistently match the comic heights of such illustrious forebears.

One of the key challenges for writer Carl Grose and director Emma Rice (who writes gleefully in the programme notes of the comic opportunities in dismantling the jewel in the crown of Greek tragedy) must have been holding on to an audience once such a reductive path had been set. That they do is partly down to the endlessly inventive ways in which Grose and the company extract belly laughs from basic slapstick. That and the talents of all four actors who, despite ranging in age from 42 to 49 (a running gag in this show), deliver fantastically physical and energetic performances.