Spinach review

I must admit it was with certain trepidation that I went to see Spinach at The King’s Head Theatre. “Thrills, abductions, pills, attraction, laughs and prescriptions…and it’s all sung,” declares the blurb on the poster. My cynical heart sank. Why be out on a Friday night seeing a musical comedy when you can stay in and watch Have I Got News For You? (I lead an exciting life…) These feelings were all soon forgotten though as Spinach proved to be an absolute delight.

The play is about Tom (Ben Gerrard – of Hollyoaks fame) and Kate (Cassandra Compton – of X Factor fame) who wake up and find themselves tied back to back with no idea of who each other is or how they both got there. Their memories play out before us as flashbacks and gradually piece by piece the story begins to emerge and develop as Tom and Kate begin to figure out who their captors are and just what a sticky situation they are in.

The creators of the show have been very adamant that this is not a musical or an opera, just a play where everything happens to be sung…which in my books kind of makes it an opera, or at least an operetta. In fact there is something Gilbert and Sullivan about the show. The plot is light, funny and ridiculous and you wonder how it ever will all work out in the end. However the humour is mixed in with a nice undercurrent of danger and a sinister twist that makes you care more about the fate of all of the characters involved. The show has a moral message at its heart, which thankfully is not shoved in your face but is there to add a weight to the piece and stop it from being all fluff.

For one awful moment at the start I thought it was just going to be two people tied back to back for the whole eighty minutes (luckily this is not the case) and towards the end some of the movements getting into the flashback scenes seemed a bit clunky. Also some of the laughs in the show are fairly obvious and there is not a great deal of subtlety to the piece as a whole (you can pretty much guess the ending half way through) but the chemistry between the cast really gets you involved in the story and whilst I didn’t laugh out loud at everything, I was constantly engaged and amused throughout.

The most wonderful thing about the show though is the skill of the four cast members. The performance was flawless which considering the difficultly of the piece is mightily impressive. Not only do all the cast sing, they play instruments too giving us interludes on guitar, ukulele and a wonderfully comic saxophone accompaniment to one song by Claire Whittaker. Vocally however it is Cassandra Compton who steals the show whilst Gerrard proves himself too as a very good comic actor doing a great turn as the geeky, girlfriendless male lead.

Spinach is a bit of a pub performance, fringe theatre romp. If you are expecting high art and operatics then you may be disappointed, but if you are looking for a bit of fun then it really does hit the right notes.