Spy For Spy – Riverside Studios, London

Writer: Kieron Barry

Director: Lucy Jane Atkinson

Kieron Barry’s two-hander comedy romance Spy For Spy is, the show blurb tells us, “an attempt to create a play which exists outside the concept of form itself”. Dissect that grand ambition and you have a piece that consists of six episodes of around 15 minutes, some comic, some tragic, each of which explores a different stage in the tempestuous relationship between buttoned-up, ambulance-chasing lawyer Sarah and goofy failing-actor-cum-waitperson Molly.

Form departs here because the running order of the episodes is randomly chosen by the Riverside Studios audience prior to each performance. Topped and tailed by a fixed prologue and epilogue, this is a show that still has 720 permutations. The version seen at press night may not be seen again for another couple of years; something not guaranteed to make a reviewer’s life easier. More or less anything one says about the narrative is likely to be a spoiler for somebody. But here goes.

Let’s start by assuming somewhere along the line at least one audience will see the show laid out in the correct chronological structure. That is to say, events unfold in the order they happen. In this putative version, does the story work?

Well, originality is not this narrative’s most obvious attribute, but that almost seems to be the point. Aside perhaps from the gender aspect, the plotline covers territory familiar to anyone who has ever watched a romcom or seen Eric Segal’s 1970 movie blockbuster Love Story. Posh girl Sarah (Amy Lennox) meets poor girl Molly (Olive Gray). The attraction is immediate, sparks fly, families get in the way, affection waxes and wanes, then an apparently insurmountable block to love emerges. In one episode Sarah pithily sums up Shakespeare (the Bard is a recurring motif throughout), “final scene sad equals tragedy, final scene happy equals comedy”. No surprise that this tale is going in one of two predictable directions.

So, what in the absence of much plot novelty, makes this show quite as fiendishly clever and hugely rewarding as it manifestly is? Partly it is Barry’s immense technical skill in establishing powerful characters early on, and then laying out backstory and events that, regardless of the order in which they appear, round out our comprehension of who Molly and Sarah are.

We know two episodes in that Sarah’s high opinion of herself masks deep anxiety. Despite outward beauty and material success, inside she is an alcoholic in a mess. Subsequent episodes add layer and depth to her persona – “it is like sleeping with Tutankhamun” is how Molly denounces Sarah’s attitude to sex – without altering our fundamental concept of who Sarah is. “I don’t eat in the wrong order” she harrumphs at one point. The line says something about Sarah but is also a metatheatrical comment on what we are being served up in the play: everything here is in the wrong sequence. Foreshadowing in one performance becomes bitter hindsight in another.

Similarly with Molly, in every episode it is clear that the character’s garrulous charm masks a crushing lack of self-confidence. She is a hopeless dreamer whose aspirations of becoming a Hollywood star reside mostly in her own head. Yet episode after episode introduces a different facet to her: one that highlights but does not alter her essential self.

If there is a fault here it is that Barry’s script suffers from one or two too many knowing references to the play’s central conceit. “Our happy ending came in the middle”, says one of the characters. “Everybody thinks you have to go forward, but sometimes you don’t,” says the other. Molly describes an ayahuasca trip in which “everything that ever happened” to her passed through her mind at the same time. There is an unnecessary repetitiveness here.

Gray and Lennox have tremendous chemistry as the bickering mismatched duo, particularly in the show’s many raucous, laugh-out-loud scenes. Gray’s comic timing is impeccable. In chronologically the first episode, though you may not see it first, they try to persuade a dubious Sarah that North is always the direction they face. It is a divine scene of perfectly structured comic delight, immaculately executed. The actors’ chemistry is there too in the darker moments, when love threatens to turn to hate in the blink of an eye, and when the comic tone becomes decidedly bittersweet.

Lucy Jane Atkinson’s direction is tight and never intrusive. Bethia Jane Green’s set – pastel walls, levered windows, sparse decoration – ably suggests southern California. Props are few and far between, mostly one imagines because moving them around is a challenge if you only know 30 minutes in advance of curtain up what stage transitions you will need to make.

Spy For Spy is clever, often very funny, and at times tragic. What order these elements arrive in is in your hands.

Runs until 2 July 2023