Naomi van den Broek reviews Two Girls One Gun, created and performed by Comedy Gold, at The Great Hall, Te Matatiki Toi Ora The Arts Centre, as part of the World Buskers Festival, Friday 24 January, 2025.
Comedy Gold describe their work as ‘genre bending’, and I think it’s an entirely apt description of what a capacity audience at the Great Hall are treated to on the opening night of the World Buskers Festival 2025. Combining a witty script and original songs, with a masterclass in stage combat, excellent physical comedy and perfectly pitched interplay with the audience, Two Girls One Gun is as near an exact fit for a buskers festival as you could hope.
Our two agents, debonair Brit Vaja Steele (Phoebe Caldeiro), and slinky Ruskie Titsa Dynamite (Nina Hogg), are thrown together in the tradition of all good unwitting buddy comedies for the ultimate mission (and if successful, a corporate bonus). They must recover a stolen hard drive from a secret location, which will require all their considerable spycraft and gadgets to be tested to the limits.
The show opens with a sexy Bond-esque theme song, while our protagonists transform from sleek operatives to seductive sirens before our eyes – all while singing live – and not without some fantastically funny awkwardness and quite a lot of ‘nudge nudge wink wink’ to the audience. It sets the scene perfectly for what this racy 50-minute show has to deliver.
Two Girls One Gun has a script full of puns and send ups guaranteed to hit the mark with any Jason Bourne, Mission Impossible, and John Le Carré fans in the house. Its excellent mix of wit, farce, and downright silliness is a delight. I particularly enjoy the eulogy composed of just about every Bond film title you can think of, an excellent set up for a very silly and well-received punchline. The off-the-cuff lines and audience interactions are beautifully managed. The spicy doses of feminist humour work so well in this parody of what has often been a very male-dominated and problematically sexist genre.
Physically this show is exceptional. The actual stunts!!! and stage combat are seamlessly intertwined throughout the show. They are dextrous, hilarious and at times downright astonishing. A large metal aerial rig that dominates the stage awkwardly is only used once, but I reckon the payoff is worth it. Simple props and lots of fun sight gags are judiciously dotted throughout the show. The third, unnamed, company member works as stagehand extraordinaire, and appears as a number of other characters including our supervillain. An unsuspecting audience member, Ross, plays along good-humouredly as a henchman in a few scenes. This well-considered bit of audience participation is a big hit.
This show would have been a complete smash if not for one quite major impediment: the choice of venue. I really love the Great Hall; it’s beautiful, warm, and for some artforms utterly ideal. Sadly, it did not work for this show. I am seated in the front half of the audience, and much of the excellent staging is completely invisible and I can’t hear large chunks of the script. I only see and hear as much of the show as I do because I physically leave my seat and stand at the side, including for several of the longer combat scenes. This makes for a very subdued and quiet audience, as we are all desperately trying to hear, and not reacting too loudly so we don’t miss what is coming next. There is obvious disappointment and grumbling from the audience as we are leaving, and I really feel for the performers who had to work so much harder than they should have.
Initially this show was programmed at Little Andromeda, where the seating is raked and the space is smaller. Sadly, my lasting feeling from this performance is that it’s such a shame it was moved, and how much more enjoyment I would have had from seeing it presented in a more sympathetic space.
Two Girls One Gun played for one night only. The rest of the festival programme can be found here.
Flat City Field Notes 