spymonkeyblog

I cannot move anymore. I had eaten the most amazing haddock stuffed with crab that I had tried in many years. I have drunk a wonderful reserve; RVA, Remelluri and I had lovely starters. Of course the bill has not been small and the best thing is that I have not paid it. Well, actually the best thing is that I have seen my brother and my parents and my lovely wife. The best thing was to see Miren. I have been three weeks without seeing here and I was really missing her a lot.

I had not seen my brother for more that a year but he is like a tough guy so it does not matter too much. He came with my father to pick me at the airport. My mum and my brother’s girlfriend were at the mall and Miren went from work to the restaurant. It has been very nice to eat all together there. My sister is in Senegal so she was not there.

In the morning I came from London. Jon and me left Cal’s very early and because it was raining we took the fast way with the tube. Nevertheless we arrived to the airport twenty minutes later than I expected. And then… you know? When I am at airports there are many things that happen like people in the cue to check inn are always in a hurry apart from the moment when they have to actually check inn. The they rest against the counter, have a little chat with the member of the staff or simply look at the end of the cue and fell really happy with themselves.

Well, we did all that and I was getting really piss. Then with our boarding cards we went into the departures lounge and the guy at the door after telling us if we were taking any liquids he decided to check if Jon’s suitcase was too big to be hand luggage. And picked the suitcase and put it up side down into the measure box and it was not. Then he tried to put it inn sideways and it was just a little bit too big. The fact is that just the handle and a little bit of the legs were not going inn. The cunt, the anal cunt made us to go back and check the fucking suitcase. I wanted to kill him on spot but very slowly. He was a fucking anal cunt.

As I write the title for the blob I realise that there are not relationships between one thing, lost friends and the others. The only link is that yesterday they all decided to come and see Miss Behave Variety Nights. They all came in through me. And no, it is not that I have an special power that allows people to walk through me, the only thing that I had to do was to go out a little bit before the opening of the show and walk them inn. “Stay by the bar and when the everybody is sited then take the empty sits and do not leave in the break because they will probably will ask you for a ticket and you do not have one”

So my lost and found again friend is Nicolas. Funnily enough as I met him again I realised that he was much better friend that I remember so I am very happy that I have found him again. He came all the way from Stroud to see the show.

Then Maria is a very pretty girl that is a set designer and that now is pregnant. She came with the responsible of the damage to see the show. Maria is a very nice girl.

And then the Pole People… I read Pole People and it sounds like a tribe from Africa or South East Asia that lives in the jungle and have a kind of ritual that includes a Pole but not. They are the girls who taught us how to do Pole Dancing.

They are really pretty and they came to see the show all together and well we all drip with pleasure by just looking at them and now just that they are really nice and generous and… if you are giving a party or if you want to learn how to Pole Dance you should contact them and …

I am going to stop now. Tomorrow I am going to Bilbao, Petra is back in Cambridge teaching communication skills to Japanese students, Toby is off to Germany to see his wife and kids and Stephan and his family will stay in Brighton while Toby is away. These three days are going to feel like a whole month.

There are many things you have to do when you have a theatre company. We have a comic theatre company. We cannot say anymore that we have a clown company because people who have money to invest in theatre do not like to hear the word clown. It makes them confuse. So form now on Spymonkey is a comic theatre company.

One of the thing that any theatre company has to do in this theatre to survive is to create and have good relationships with many theatres. The best theatres to have relationships with are the ones that also work as production houses.  How do you create good relationships? It is not easy but usually start by doing your show there, or by inviting their directors to see your show somewhere else or another option is to be friends with the person that finally ends up being the director of that theatre.

We full fill that with Northampton because Martin Sutherland was our friend before he becomes director of the theatre in Northumberland.

In any case this morning we all went and we had a nice time seeing all friends and telling them about our future projects. And then there is Laurie who is the Artistic director of the theatre and he is also a very nice guy and by now friend of Spymonkey.

Cal came to see the show in the evening with his parents. It is very nice when Cal comes to see the show because he always makes us work harder. We do better shows. He brought his parents and he brought Matt. He is the director of the two numbers and once again he has done a very good job. The show that he has directed for Edinburgh, the Office Party has been nominated for the Total Theatre Award. I hope they win and if you are going to Edinburgh do not miss the show. It is a fantastic show.

 It really is a horrible dumpy night. It has not stop raining and thou Jon is here and that is nice we are tired and hungry. The bus is going through Highgate forest and we have been walking the best part of the day and now it is time to get some food and relax.

I have told Matt and Cal that I will take them to dinner tonight with Jon. They are the most generous people in the world. They let me live in the Sire with them and I am not a Hobbit and… well, I wanted to show them my appreciation because they really make me fell happy here in London. They really do. The Sire is now my second home and I am a troll and I am used to live in the swamps and now I live in the sire far away from the dangers of the middle earth.

So we choose a Chinese restaurant so we can have lots of jokes about the food and about the people that work in the restaurant and also about the Olympic games that are happening in the restaurant. Well, in this restaurant in the Sire they have chosen a movie theme CD and we are eating with the music of Harry Potter and then the Wizard of Oz. You would have thought that they were being performed with Chinese instruments but no; it is the easy listening version.

We had a great time. We drunk too much and then by mistake I left a 50 pounds tip that the lady in the restaurant very generously told me that it was wrong and that she was returning back to me.

It is good to eat this food. It was very good and I highly recommend if you want to eat in a Chinese restaurant here in the Sire go to that one because it is very good. There is another one but they use Gluten and bad chemicals to make the food taste good.

We left for home and we drunk a last glass of wine before returning to our rooms to spend the night.

In a city that you know for many years it is always a very nice idea to go and walk around. You do that and discovered many places that have been changing over the years.

I do not visit them until I need to visit them or there is not chance for me to escape from it. So, Jon is here. He has come to London on holydays. He came to see the show at the Round house and also to see things in the theatre and try to see some friends.

Really, he is starting to think that his daughter needs a place to stay in England when the time to learn English comes. So he has paid a visit to revisit the old friends so he could have his daughter at their houses as a summer school.

He arrived a couple of days ago and he will be going back with me to Bilbao on the 18^th with Clickair.

Perhaps if I keep mention them in the blog they will start to give me free tickets for my trips from Bilbao to London.

So we walked everywhere. We went to Oxford because I wanted to buy some shoes and then we walked to the Strand and we had a pint. Then we walked through Embankment Bridge all the way to the South bank and we ended up at the Young Vic. I love that place. As Cal said the reason why I love it is because it brings me very good memories.

And the other day I met on the street Hattie. She was the costume designer of the show. She has had a baby called Olivia. She is very pretty. It was really nice to meet her at Highgate Station.

And I am going to stop now because I writing with not sense and out of borinees and duty of trying to write on blog everyday and posted in the net.

I did not know what happened at then end of the play. The three girls the good ones and the bad ones and the poor old man that was just trying to play a joke on the girls when he knew all the time who was his favourite and also who of the three loved him the most. But you know if you like games you tend to fuck up. Yes, because sometimes is very difficult to play games with people that do not know how to play a games.

In any case it is a lovely production. For all of you that are in the company I went to see a production of the National Theatre of Spain of King Lear and I hated it. And this one I thought it was great. It was a little bit long specially in the first part but then the second one I liked it a lot.

Ben from Illiana was in the show. He was good. It was really good fun to see him playing there with all those important actors with big voices. My favourite was Cordelia and the King thou I did not understand him very much.

Also it was my first time at the Globe and I came. I know silly joke. I thought it was very nice but it is the last time that I get a ticket to go in the yard standing up and the whole thing is too much. The play was long, it rain during almost the whole of the first part and then everybody was moving around, the acoustics were a little bit funny. I am not saying anything against the globe is more my ears which are not at their best these days.

So over all this is a great production of King Lear in a mythical theatre who could loose 20 minutes but very enjoyable especially if you are a foreigner like myself.

Miss Behave Variety Nighty

       Thu Aug 7

                                Critics’ Choice

        Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Rd, London, NW1 8EH

                        Rating:

Apart from Bret Pfister’s magical aerial hoop act, the only other stand-out performance of the night was by the fabulously funny physical theatre company, Spymonkey – truly gifted clowns; by the end of the evening you wished there’d been a lot more of them and far fewer of the naff torch songs.

And yet good reviews as much as bad reviews do not do anything against our desire to make people laugh as much as we can. And let me tell you that this is our most honest desire. That is the only reason why we do what we do. So Neil thanks so much for what you have to say about the show. At the end of the day everybody sees a different show and that is great.

This does no mean that I love when people like you say they laughed a lot. And the reason why I love it is because we have successes.

So thanks ever so much to all those of you who came to the Roundhouse and have had a lot of fun and also thanks ever so much to all of those who came to the Roundhouse to see what was going on or thinking that you were going to see something amazing and great and that was not the case.

It is great to go to see a show so go and see shows.

Miss Behave’s Variety Nighty

by SHARON LOUGHER - Sunday, August 10, 2008

Miss Behave, aka cabaret star Amy Saunders, certainly brings an element of class to her variety night’s proceedings. She’s a demure, deliciously slinky MC for starters – plus she also happens to be a world-record holding sword swallower. (She stuffs one down her neck on this occasion, plus a table leg and pint of beer.) But what she doesn’t manage is to whip up this large Roundhouse crowd with her between-skit patter. On our night there was a cheerful hum of appreciation, sure – but given the calibre of the acts Saunders has programmed is so high, you can’t help thinking that the buzz here should have been frenzied.

Many are a treat, wrapping their formidable skills with the kind of theatrical flourishes that give variety nights the kick up the backside they need. Two separate aerialists have fun with their entrances, the hot-panted Kalki Hula Girl looks like a clubber gleefully lost in music as she struts her stuff to dance beats; Bret Pfister, meanwhile, has a youthful look of disdain as he has more fun with hoops.

There are a few duff notes; Spymonkey’s shock-tactic approach felt crude and tired, while a contortionist struggled to turn her talent into a successful theatrical set piece.But, mostly, this is a fine night that’s full of entertaining and jaw-dropping surprises.

Again, I can take this quite nicely but I do not like very much when they do not like us. It is something that upset me. Then you hear the laughs and well there is nothing else to say so I wander where these people were sitting or the quality of their sense of humour. Yes, I know you should never argue a review but I am doing it now.  

Miss Behaves Variety Nighty - The Sunday Times review

Roundhouse, NW1

Louis Wise

Well, it’s nothing if not honest. “We aim to entertain,” the programme says. “There is no message.” It’s certainly a relief — or who knows what you might take from the repertoire of Frank Sanazi (Sinatra as a rabid, Aryan-loving Nazi: Ol’ Blue Eyes, indeed)? No message is no problem at all, but it means there are few surprises in this evening of cabaret tricks, compered by the PVC-clad Miss Behave. By and large, the gymnastic acts have an edge on the funny ones, which are mostly crude and obvious.

Nothing against not liking us. It happens all the time but that well, sometimes makes me hungry.  

So this is all it is, once you have opened a show then you wait for what the people thing about the show.

But I want to tell you that we are working with very nice people. I our dressing room we have Brett and Lindell. They do numbers in the air and they are really nice and a very good laugh. We have become very good friends in a very short time.

In the other dressing room is where the girls are, Margo, Amy, Lucy, Kolky and there are the dressing rooms for the guest stars like Pete that place this Nazi character. He is really funny and nice. I get to know the girls less because they are not in the same room as us but apart from being very talented they are nice and funny. Margo reminds me of John Guilky, she plays too much.

I love Lucy and Amy she is great. She can do better but the job is big and she has to relax and have fun but she is a nice girl to have around.

Then the technical team who fuck up very often but they are great and everyday gets better, Arno, Dug, Robin, Lee, Adens (he is sweedes) and Enzo they are really great people to work with.

So now the reviews, there have been good ones and bad ones and I do not give a flying fuck. I am going to try to run them by you so you could tell or think about them us much as you want.

We have had a really bad night tonight. Like really bad. There was something that should never have happened because it is not one-person show it is the whole team show. The pressure is high and it is difficult to keep everything under control.

And in away if you think about it trying to do the most positive thing possible from it, the effect that a bad atmosphere in the house creates on the artist going to do their number is huge. Everybody has to pick up the pieces of the people that went in before you so everybody needs to work together. It was not nice. It was not pretty and it felt really frustrating. Tomorrow will be another day and this will make us better and stronger.

So fuck everybody, I mean please do fuck is very good for the soul and very good for your body. Aerobic exercise.