James Bond
Cliffhanger
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre.

Britain’s Cliffhanger Theatre Company’s ]ames Bond may not be everybody’s idea of a universal export but will tickle those who like their comedy somewhere between the Goodies and the Spanish Inquisition. Although, unlike the more pugnacious forms of manic English humour, James Bond is low-key, whimsical and gets curiouser and curiouser.

The four Cliffhangers give Ian Fleming’s imperturbable Bond a right old filleting. Pete McCarthy has the familiar tux and grooming but his baretta has a droop to its barrel and he is developing Doubts. Why does. Moneypenny keep chugging off to get files which nobody asked for? Has Q really developed a salad dressing you can use as a speedboat and why does M only ever say “Sort it out, do a bit of wind-surfing and shag a few foreigners”?

Besides, James Bond has met Janice a single parent in a share house and is ready to hand in his double-0 licence to become a creche co-ordinator and play group leader. But he is not adjusting easily to civilian life. On his first day he kills fifteen children and puts them in a skiff. And there are the machinations of yet another Evil Genius, this time with the mysterious Church of Mush. As they say, there is one reborn every minute and it looks for a while there as though James is going to be one of them.

From the opening credits – in screen silhouette in the legendary style of the Saltzman and Broccoli films, ]ames Bond is a succession of quiet drolleries which are satirically sharp and engagingly performed. McCarthy’s numbskull Bond doesn’t miss a beat nor do Tony Haase as M, Robin Driscoll as Q and Rebecca Stevens as Janice, Moneypenny and the fatale Svetlana.

Car chases and submarine dives are presented in hilariously minute detail and the familiar bars of John Barry’s theme are sepulchrally chanted by the characters who provide gulps, plomps, whizzes, twangs, doyngs and pings for everything from underwater fight scenes to darts contests. Cliffhanger find comic pleasure in everything from silly walks to delusions of imperial grandeur. They don’t push the material and only ad-lib sparingly (and so to great effect) but all the while they keep laying slow fuses which implode with daggy unpredictability.

As relentlessly daft as the spycatchers themselves, ]ames Bond, like the Fleming novels, ends with a series of revelations and deflations which are too silly for words. But, all in all, the show is a jolly wheeze and a crafty piece of work. When he rounds up the Master Fiends with his love child Judy strapped on him in a Mothercraft papoose, you know one old cold warrior won’t be the same again, James has broken from bondage.

“Catch a Falling Spy” (James Bond) The Adelaide Review, No. 63, May 1989, pp.24-5.