Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Cast: Aitor Basauri, Stephen Kreiss, Petra Massey, Toby Park.

Twenty glorious years in the making, and still the riotous laughter keeps coming, for Brighton-based theatre company Spymonkey; there is no sitting delicately on laurels, resting in the plumped up leather chair beside the roaring fire and passion of the audience, even returning to one of the foursome’s early successes means being match fit, confining themselves to the bird house until the pen sparks life once more.

For Aitor Basauri, Stephen Kreiss, Petra Massey and Toby Park, Cooped is not just a defining moment in the group’s history, it is a production that dares to go further, to be brave, to show physical comedy as a naked beast and in which inhibitions are let go like a ping pong ball being shot into the air, not knowing where it will land but the image is sure to have audiences crying with laughter.

If there is an area ripe for comedy it is in the expression of the Gothic Horror/Romance, a place in which much is made of mood and symbolism, an enclosure of dreams and fantasies in which has caught the swooning breath and heaving tides of loves in a deep fascination for decades. It is also a genre which upon the face of it is absurd, always playing to well-worn tropes, the mysterious owner of the estate, the sinister butler, the love interest who holds secrets and the woman, lost, receptive to otherworldly phantasmagoria; it is begging for comedy and the satirical thrust, and Spymonkey give it all they have, and the result is divine and perfect.

Cooped though is also about trust, not only between the four members, and especially for the superb Petra Massey who is fearless in some of the positions she is placed in her role of the heroine, Laura but also between the troupe and the crowd. Trust is a huge ask in the theatre, to defy convention and the expected niceties is to let the crowd understand that they too can shed their skin and their inhibitions go, the uptight let loose and the absurdity of moment becomes a sensation of wit and physical endurance.

Spymonkey have always been held in high regard by Liverpool audiences, watching Cooped as it flies on the Playhouse Stage it is with little wonder that the four are quite rightly regarded as clowns supreme.

Ian D. Hall