Two Girls One Gun

Two Girls One Gun is the latest production by Comedy Gold, aka Phoebe Caldeiro and Nina Hogg. It’s doing a one-week run at BATS Theatre. We’ve seen this duo in two previous productions, Cocked & Loaded, and When Booty Calls. Based on our past experience, we knew what we were in for this time, as they take on the spy genre.

But first, as always, dinner. I’ve been trying to get into Koji for a while now – since I first noticed it, in fact. It’s a sister restaurant to Rosella, which we’ve been to a few times, located on the ground floor on Majoribanks Street in Mount Victoria. Unfortunately it is highly popular as a local restaurant for the denizens of Mount Vic, so this time I booked well in advance and secured a table. It’s Japanese-inspired shared plates, and our waiter tried to entice us into their “Just Feed Me” option (which Rosella also do) but time constraints led us to selecting from the menu, where we had oysters (natch!), salmon pie tee, roasted broccoli, dumplings and beef carpaccio. All very good, and we tried their oriental cocktails as well – mine was a martini with sake and yuzu-infused vodka, Nicola had a yuzu, grapefruit and infused tequila concoction. We’ll definitely be back, and will make time for the feed me option.

BATS is just around the corner, so we trotted round and arrived with plenty of time. As we entered the auditorium, both performers were dangling from the ceiling on Mission Impossible-type rigs, doing various twirls with greater or less success. Then the lights went down, they released themselves from the harnesses, and the show began.

The opening sequence sounds a lot like (but not enough to infringe copyright) a James Bond theme, and the two actors do a creditable imitation of the opening titles to a Bond film. The basic plot is that agent Vaja Steele has been demoted from MI6 to MI3.5, and isn’t happy about it. To try to get her old job back, she undertakes a mission to recover a drive which contains details of all of MI6’s agents. The mission fails, and her partner and friend Lorraine is killed. After the funeral, the undeterred Vaja tries again, and encounters a Russian agent, Titsa Dynamite, who tells her that not only does the drive contain MI6’s details, but also those of Russian SVR agents. So begins Vaja’s greatest challenge to date: teamwork!

As usual, the dialogue is peppered with double entendres, single entendres, and various references to spy movies – Bond, Bourne and MI all get a look-in, and even Atomic Blonde and Evelyn Salt get a mention. The fight scenes are well choreographed, and also the obligatory gymnastics-through-the-laser-alarm-system routine, where fortunately they find the cleaners’ off switch. I mean, the cleaners can’t do gymnastics, can they? There’s also a reference to the “Apparition Arrangement”. “You mean the Ghost Protocol?” “No, there’s too much copyright!” Again, music reminiscent of Mission Impossible plays, but not quite close enough to infringe.

It's all a jolly jape, and only lasts 50 minutes. But as the blurb says, it has more jokes and punches per minute than any other spy-comedy debuting at BATS Theatre in July. And you can’t really ask for more than that.