Skyduck

Skyduck is subtitled as a Chinese Spy Comedy. Sounds fun? You bet. It’s on at Circa until the end of the week, so we popped along to see it.

Nicola was on ushing duties again, so we decided to dine in at Circa’s restaurant, where they do a mean dumpling with spicy sauce. Only they mixed up our order (how? It was two plates of dumplings!) and brought us steamed vegetables instead. So sorry, here, have the vegetables on the house, we’ll bring your dumplings in 10 minutes. Anyway, we felt much healthier after eating the free vegetables, and enjoyed our slightly delayed dumplings.

The show is written and performed by Sam Wang. Around half of it is in Chinese, but fortunately, there’s subtitles. This is all part of the multimedia experience of the show, which also includes visual effects, music, puppetry, and loads of other DIY theatrical effects. It basically documents the efforts of a team of Chinese spies (Yan and Chang, both played by Wang) to steal the code for a US flight simulator game in the 1990s. Opposing him are the American CIA agent Commander Kendrick, (voiced in a bad imitation of Donald Trump), and the leader of the Australian Air Force’s Aerobatics Display Team, all played by Wang. The performance is peppered with 90s music and references from Top Gun, The Matrix and Inception. He also showcases some extremely complex machinery that he’s built that perform multiple functions in the show. It’s all a jolly jape, so if you get the chance, give it a go!