"Spymonkey's The Frogs". Kiln Theatre

405 BC was a great year for Greek theatre*. It saw the premieres of two of the most important plays Western culture has ever produced: Euripides’ The Bacchae and Aristophanes’ The Frogs: the first one of the bloodiest and most anarchic tragedies ever written; the second one of the oldest, and yet still one of the most modern, comedies of all time. Both of them won first prize at their respective festivals. And astonishingly, both of them star the same character, Dionysus. In The Bacchae, he is a murderous, hedonistic force of nature. And in The Frogs, well, he’s a buffoon.

Coming out of the auditorium at the Kiln Theatre on Kilburn High Road, it was perhaps not a surprise to bump into Oxford Emeritus Professor of Classics, Oliver Taplin. Professor Taplin consumes Greek theatre wherever it can be found, and knows more about it than probably anyone in the country (almost definitely more than anyone in Kilburn). He and I agreed that the theatre company Spymonkey’s banner statement for their production (‘With massive apologies to Aristophanes’) was quite unnecessary. This show captured the plot, the atmosphere, the bawdiness, the post-modern self-referentiality and the comedy of Aristophanes’ original better than most. It even had the guts to include the climactic grudge-match/rap battle between the long-dead tragedian Aeschylus and the recently-departed Euripides (yes, he died before the first performance of The Bacchae). Other, more high-profile, reworkings have shied away from this. Stephen Sondheim, in his musical version, made it a battle between Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. Feh! 

The Frogs is ideal material for Spymonkey. They excel at combining clowning with high art. A few years ago their show The Complete Deaths featured every single on-stage Shakespeare death, all 75 of them, and wove them into a narrative that was both hilarious and poignant. Their technique of apparently breaking out of the scripted show to argue with each other was, if anything, pioneered by Aristophanes. His original script for The Frogs opens with Dionysus and his long-suffering servant Xanthias arguing about what the audience will find funny, and then complaining, with gossipy relish, about how other playwrights keep re-using the same jokes.

Likewise, Spymonkey love big props, and The Frogs is like a toddlers’ ballpark of opportunity for them. This show has Chaeron in his ferry across the River Styx, monsters with huge waggly tentacles, a vast frog that attempts to eat Dionysus in a carbon-copy of the T-Rex munching on the lawyer in Jurassic Park, and a giant fly trying to play a guitar.

But what it’s really about – and this is both the show’s beating heart and its Achilles heel – is the death of long-time Spymonkey collaborator and irrepressible clown genius, Stephan Kreiss. Kreiss died, suddenly and unexpectedly, at the age of 59, in August 2021. He had been with the company for over twenty years, and his performance as Queequeg in 2009’s Moby Dick was a copper-bottomed masterclass in comedy. It included a phenomenal routine in which he failed to stand up for five minutes (watch it here). In the same year the company lost their Joint Artistic Director Petra Massey, also a master of theatrical comedy, not to death but to Las Vegas (which might actually be worse).

During The Frogs, Dionysus and Xanthias, played by the company’s two remaining stalwarts Toby Park and Aitor Basauri, come out of character and, in a tiny shack representing Spymonkey HQ, realise that the show they’re performing is actually about them trying to bring Stephan back from the dead. They miss their friend, and they believe they can’t function without him. This production is their Shine on You Crazy Diamond to Stephan’s Syd Barrett. With the help of newcomer Jacoba Williams they unlock the doors to the Land of the Dead, and eventually come to accept that they must face the future alone, as a double-act, like Eric and Ernie, Tom and Jerry, Dionysus and Xanthias (or, as Artor suggests, ‘Black and Decker’).

It's very moving. And it’s funny.

But the fact is – and it’s brutal to say this – Toby and Artor are right. They do need the others. Without the full complement of four, Spymonkey can’t quite deliver the full barrage of theatrical power and mayhem that characterised their earlier shows. As a company, they have always depended on the interaction of personalities that hovered in the background of their performances. Their shows were effectively skins for the true drama, which was the power politics and alliances that formed in the characters of the company members themselves. Without them, for all the clowning, it feels as though there isn’t enough substance.

Crucially, Artor Basauri, a supremely gifted physical comedian, always played an idiot savant- type role in earlier shows, not an instigator or leader. Pushing him into being one half of a double-act just doesn’t play to his awesome strengths. If this was the Marx Brothers, Toby and the late Stephan were like Groucho and Chico, with Artor as the largely non-verbal Harpo. And Harpo doesn’t work as Chico. As a result, The Frogs, while frolicsome and poignant, doesn’t hit the heights of earlier shows.

But even a below-par Spymonkey production is better than most other plays you’ll see on a British stage. And as a eulogy for a departed friend, it’s both funny and lovingly disrespectful: exactly what Stephan Kreiss would have wanted.

* Of course the Ancient Greeks didn’t know it was 405 BC, as Jesus had not been invented yet. They called it 93^rd Olympiad Year 4. Sports mad.