Paranoia, fear, politics, backstabbing and double crossing - yes, the office is a dangerous place to work, especially if your place of employment is a cover for a covert international espionage operation.

The latest work by The Ornate Johnsons's Brian Mitchell and the shadowy Joseph Nixon, Spy takes a spoofing scalpel to the likes of The Ipcress File, The Manchurian Candidate and The Prisoner, piecing together a hilarious two-act play which sticks two fingers up to James Bond while retaining a quintessentially English sense of wit and style.

In a drab Sixties office, Chesney Stroud (Ian Shaw), a man of unquestionable stiff upper lipped-ness and civil servant grey, goes about a daily routine of dictation and Thermos-flask emptying.

But when a dangerous blonde by the name of Miss Eve (Clea Smith) turns up claiming to be his replacement secretary, events take a far more interesting turn.

Colleagues turn out to be nothing of the sort, lies are unravelled, truths are filed away and the importance of a good egg and tomato sandwich becomes the subject of a wildly passionate proposal.

Managing to combine the drab reality of day-to-day existence with the kiss-kiss bang-bang life of super-spydom, Mitchell and Nixon have crafted an irreverently reverent labour-of-love comedy.

From the opening Bond-style theme, espousing the alluring virtues of magenta, to a psychedelic brainwashing skit using lots of little lights, the colourful camp of Sixties Cold War conspiracy flicks is evidently a major influence on the writers.

Utilising a bunch of effective stage motifs to explain the labyrinthine plot, some of which work better than others, and taking full advantage of a talented cast (including the ubiquitous David Mounfield as a sort of slightly twisted Q), what could have easily turned into a mess was instead a joy to behold.

While the second half may require a fair amount of attention following the easy accessibility of the opening, Spy is a classic, even in its very early stages of development.

Clever, funny and unmistakably British to the core.