Oh, I can fell how little by little my body and my mind is getting better and better. My brain is tired but it is getting better. It feels as if it is starting to be occupied with things that no matter really. The things in my head go from the workshop that I am teaching to the things that worry me or the things that worry to everybody else in the world like the ash cloud that is stopping Europe from using the air space for flying.

How nice is that? I am flying to Paris tomorrow and it is kind of killing me to think that I am not going to be able to make it if there are not planes so… let’s see what happens.

But days here in Romo go very slow. I wake up in the morning quite early. I breakfast with my wife. I know that sounds like something that it is minimun and not important with no incidents what so ever but how wrong you are. My wife in the morning is a mistery. We have been living together for many years and I tell you I still can not work her out.

She is lovely do not miss understand me but she is unpredictable and has very bad temper, specially at this time in the day.

For me the morning, lately, is the best part of the day. I am awake, I am ready to do things, I do things and I am happy.

I do not think I need to say more. It is hell and high water.

After breakfast and a nice shower I get my bicycle and I go to work.

I am teaching a workshop in the same school where I studied first. I started to teach workshops here two years ago. In away it would have been better not to do it because no one is a prophet in their own land. But I really do like very much all the theatre things that we do so every opportunity of sharing and practicing all our way of doing theatre is a real pleasure for me.

Also the students are really good and really fresh and new in the whole theatre thing and it is absolutely great to see the love and the desire to do theatre that they have.

After work I ride my bike home and Miren is already working and I go to eat with my parents. I tried to drink a little bit of wine and then have a siesta. And really my day it is almost finish afterwards. The pleasant long afternoon starts.

To start to write about this first I have to answer to myself a couple of questions about if it is right to share with all of you this information? Or if it is right or if I have the right to share with you the fact that the enemy agreed to meet with us?

So in or of that ( I have heard that word before but I do not know how to spell it so) I am not going to name who shall not be named and all of you that know would understand and all of you that do not know would not understand. Sorry about that but I owned this to who shall not be name.

Who shall not be name deserved not to be named because was very generous and extremely nice.  Accepted to meet to talk about some different in opinions about our latest show Moby Dick. As I said in the pass I did not want to meet Who shall not be named but following the gut felling of Petra Massey we did meet in a very noisy pub in Victoria.

To see Who shall not be named for the second time it was incredible. Someone who seemed to be in a big chair over the good and bad was there in front of us and even pay for the drinks. I have to point out that we argued. We sat in a small table outside, fighting against the cold wind. We talked with our bodies forward so we can hear very the conversation and no one else.

At first we talked presentations and chit chat and then like women do and do very well we went straight to the point. I did not do that I like circles so I went in circles.

I was felling how I was getting disarmed and seduced by Who shall not be named. With an incredible displayed of charm and honesty we faced someone that simply did not like our show but did really liked. In a very courteous way explained to us that would like to help. Who shall not be named did not like the show or better said Who shall not be named did not find Moby Dick funny and Who shall not be named had not come to meet us to convinced other ways. I do appreciate that a lot. I like people with integrity and opinions but not in a fundamentalistic way.

In any case we drunk and Who shall not be named and we talked theatre and people that we know which in mane cases is the same thing.

In my opinion Who shall not be named and we had a very good meeting.

I personally learned a lot with our meeting with Who shall not be named and I wish who shall not be named would not be the enemy because the worst thing is that can happen is that one would like the enemy and then they would not be not battle.

Thanks very much to “Who shall not be named” and looking forward to our next battles.

It has been a good workshop. I have had a very good time. I am tired now. I am very tired. It is late. I just have arrived from the workshop and everybody is in bed and I am in bed myself and I am going to sleep. It is not what I would like to do now but it is the only thing that I have energy for.

This week has been so hard work.

I said to the students at the very last moment of the workshop that I felt that the workshop has had lots of moments of start and stop. Suddenly for a very good part of the day the whole thing would flow like a river and then the whole thing would collapse.

I cannot really work out why it is that. In a way I have an idea but I do need to let it rest and in a couple of days think about it again. And I promise that when I will discover what was the reason for that then I will share it with you.

For a little while I thought that if may have been just my fault but then I realised that it was not. When you do a workshop you have to work. Workshops are always a collaborative effort. It is not like going to the school where the teacher tells you everything and then you just do what you are told.

Even with these comments the workshop has been really great. The students have evolved massively. From the day one where everybody presented their guns and their skills and how funny they were to today where everybody was really open and happy and trying to break something inside themselves that would make them great the journey has been really hard, really exciting and really good fun.

I thank all of you for that, Chris, Angus, Mark 1, Mark 2, Patricia, Hazel, Lila, Marce, Sharon, Abby, Dean, Petra, Tom, Lucy, Arif and Kalki. I hope I have not forgotten any one. I had lots of fun with all of them and I hope to see them again and again.

I started a little bit scared. I know I am not in the best of my times because I am tired. When I am tired I cannot concentrate so I am not very fine with my comments and I get confused and I am sure I also make the students confused.

The people at the workshop are going to suffer the fact that five people have dropped from the workshop at last minute.

Petra tells me not to worry and she is right but I cannot help it. I think to do clowning it is something very dangerous and fragile and I want to be very good so everybody can have a great time and enjoy every moment of the course.

The group is really great. It is a big mix bunch of people and I think the level is going to very high.

As a taste just in the first day we all have gone very far. The youngest person is 22 and he is already very funny.

I had a little bit of an incident with a girl that talked to me back when I was being a master of the universe. That is not good. It is not good for her. The audience laugh because they like the teacher to get kill but clowns should always love their teacher.

I spoke to her afterwards and I think that she is going to be coming back.

My only criticism is to the lyric. We have rented a room there and they are always late with everything and frankly a little bit disorganised. It seems to me a if we are working in one of those big Russian theatres from the communist times where someone will ask for something and there would be so many people receiving and giving the order that nothing got done because the order always got lost. Here is a little bit the same. We are working at the studio and it is cold, and there is not enough light and that entire thing that are not nice for working.

If I have to be honest with you, I don’t think I have to I thought we were going to be working at the rehearsal room. That is a very nice room, much much nicer than the studio and the horrible little room over the box office.

In any case tomorrow would be another day and I am sure it is going to be very good fun.

Spymonkey’s Moby Dick

By Sarah Hemming

Published: May 3 2010 03:00 | Last updated: May 3 2010 03:00

“Call me Ishmael,” says our narrator at the beginning of the evening. That much is familiar. But I don’t think Herman Melville managed to squeeze quite so many sight gags and running jokes into his epic novel as Spymonkey does. In this deliberately garbled stage adaptation of the tale of Captain Ahab (or Captain Kebab as he is dubbed here) and his crazed pursuit of the whale, the cast mangles the text, bungles the drama and produces a couple of hours of enjoyable nonsense.

The premise is a pretty common one. The company plays a fictitious, inept theatre group that takes on the telling of a great classic and makes a hash of it. Here the aspiring “Compagnie Tony Parks”, headed by actor-manager Tony Parks (Toby Park) – a big fish in a small pond – attempts to tell the tale with just four actors, slender resources and an even slimmer grasp of dignity. It doesn’t help that one of the acting quartet is a woman (Petra Massey), who keeps trying to break her way into a narrative that is noticeably short on female characters, and that one (Aitor Basauri) has a nigh impenetrable foreign accent. He informs us, beaming, that he is to play the narrator because we will all “have to pay more attention”.

There are plenty of entertaining gags – the lamp that won’t blow out, the tankard stuck to the table – in Jos Houben’s production. And Stephan Kreiss as the harpooner Queequeg offers a masterclass in slapstick. Elsewhere there’s meta-theatrical comedy, as one crew member notices that they are sailing the oceans with only half a boat and as Massey takes to bursting on stage wearing only red stilettos and a few strategically placed rubber rings. And the company seizes on the marketing opportunity for “Aloe Sailor” bubble bath.

It’s harmless fun and very jolly. The drawback, though, is that that is all it is. This is a talented crew: you begin to feel that they could produce something more original with a bigger goal. Once it becomes apparent that nothing more is on offer, the show becomes becalmed and the cast just a little too eager to raise a laugh. Still, you will probably have to sail the seven seas to find another example of a macho stand-off over who can best imitate a whale’s underwater call.

I am sure that by now and with the reviews and all those things you all know that we have a choir in the show. The choir is never the same one. First because we travel from place to place and there is not budget for everybody and second because we can not ask lots of people to be reliable for not money so that provokes that we have to have a different choir to every place we go and also different choir if we play for too long in the same place. I have to say that meeting all those people in all those places have been absolutely amazing and very good fun. We have found or better say Petra has an incredibly big amount of generous people all over the place. They all have come on time to their bit and they all have been very nice and cheerful with our very silly demands. At the end of the day I think that they all have had a very good time and I am sorry that I have not had a much better relationship with them. They appear for a short but right amount of time. While at the Lyric we had a crisis because there was not many choir in London that would do it for not money so we have to gathered some pieces or better Petra did and she created a choir with some other choir member, the core of one of the choirs and then what she ended up calling Petra’s friends choir. They were really great. Because I know some of Petra’s Friends I started to have a bigger relationship with them and it was very good fun. Every night after the performance everybody goes to the pub and have some beers they all have fun with each other’s and because it is a big bunch of people many things happen. I would like to say to all of you from here THANKS EVER SO MUCH and see you soon. Next time I will be closer.

For all of you that are not familiar with the London theatre world the name that appears at the top of my piece is the name of one of the most important reviewers of the country. She holds the title of reviewer for theatre of the Guardian. Her opinion can change the fates of many shows and companies.

In many ways we are the result of a very good review of her at the beginning of our time working together. She came to see Stiff very early on at Chaplaincy Centre in Edinburgh and she gave us four stars. After that review and the fact that the show as quite good and funny the audiences started to come and we did not loose too much money.

She did not make us but she helped a lot.

Since then every time she has come anything that we have done she has hated it. She did not like Cooped and she gave us a very bad review.

Last Saturday she came to see Moby Dick and today there is a horrible review of the show in the paper. I personally think that her opinion is very valid. She did not like it. She is not the first person that does not like the show and I know that the show is not for everyone. It is a funny and the only reason why I know that it is because the audience laugh. I have said before that it is not my most favourite show of us but that is also my personal opinion.

Perhaps the most alarming thing about a bad review of Lyn is that it could kill our latest not the last opportunity to become a Comic Theatre company who can live the whole year from the work they do. If this run at the Lyric does not finish in a positive note our future is uncertain. It is always like that but we do get paid very badly. So for someone that knows so much about theatre in this country and also that knows so much about how difficult it is to put up a show and make it to the higher leagues and someone that knows about how difficult it is to survive being truth full to what you believe is good work that is not a very good review.

In any case Lyn has a very good job because give voice to many companies that like us have just done their first show and if it would not be by her dedication they would not exist. I just wish she would understand that the journey is very long and it does not really goes all the time by the acceptance of the reviewer but from the acceptance of the audience. Thanks nevertheless for coming to see our show.

How many times have called these pieces “Last Night”? I have done it so many times. The reason is because there have been so many times when I had to talk about the “Last Night” in the way I am going to have to talk about it now.

It was not a good night. It was not a good night because we did not do the show very well and some important people did not like so suddenly the whole thing becomes a much more important issue. In any case some very important people did like it a lot, which is great but that, is not what I was going to talk about now.

What I was going to talk about now is the fact that we did not do a good show. I did not do a good show. I felt completely put off in the beginning by something and I could not hold it. I could not control it I was like living in another planet. I know I should not say this but I wanted to impress my friends Antonio and Hailey and to be trying to do that it put me off completely. I lost the rhythm of everything and the most important I lost the real felling for the whole thing.

It is such a fine line between convincing the audience that we are going to tell the story and also convincing them that we are not going to bore them with the story either that if you fall just in one of the categories then that is the end of the show.

But what can you do? We tried to make a piece of comedy theatre that we like. And I have to say that not everything we do I like but we tried to do something that we would like and the audience too and I really do not know if we have succeeded.

The thing is that at the end of the day as we all said is that it is only a play or better said that it is just a play. We will see how the reviews treat us.

You cann’t fell it. You cannot fell it because if you could fell it we will not be doing our work very well. Well, and now that I am saying this there are not reasons to think that we are doing our work bad. In any case I am going to go to my point. I was talking to some friends last night after the show and I was telling them that the difference in the show between the tour we did in the autumn and the shows we are doing at the Lyric are very small but if you are in the profession perhaps you can see them.

My friend Alex pointed out that perhaps the set it is a little bit too far inn and I have to agree with him. The lights bars at the Lyric are really far back so it becomes really difficult to lit anything if you are not underneath.

This affects the perception that the audience have of the show. Clowns live underneath the iron curtain and the have to play as if the curtain would fall on top of them at any moment. And it is not me who said this I learnt this beautiful piece of information from my teachers Philippe Gaulier and Cal McCrystal.

The other factor that I think it is preventing us to have shows as I remember having is that pressure. It is the tension. It is the energy that gets created before every performance when you think that this is the one that would change your career or the performance that would break your life as a performer.

You probably our there in the stalls cann’t fell anything of that but I think I can. And being honest with you I did not fell any of that until tonight’s show. I realised that we are too careful with everything. I realised that if something goes wrong we fell apart and we have to use our pleasure made in Hong Kong to carry on doing the show. And then what it happens is that we miss the abandon of a good rehearsal, the fun of being with your friends in a great party and doing something silly for all the friends who have come to join the party. That fun, that abandons that pleasure and happiness it is what make people go to the theatre and makes show to be good or just great.

I think that we would get it very soon because the time to accommodate and learn about the theatre where we are playing has finished and we are getting more confident and relax so come to see the show again tonight if you have already seen it or just come for the first time If you have not and see for yourself if finally we have got rid of that horrible tension that is preventing us to be children playing Moby.

She is – years old today. Age is catching up to all of us. I hope in a good way but the reality is that it is in a bad way because when I finish the show every night I fell fine. It is when I wake up the next day that I am completely destroyed.

In any case I think Petra had an amazing birthday day. Or better said I hope she had a very good birthday day. She got lots of presents and it is not because we are very generous but because she makes sure that we all are aware of the day of her birthday and that we give her a present.
Stephan, Toby and me had bought a present each and then Nick had organized a cake and candles and Lucy came later and Mooky and they all gave her a present.

The sad note was that Cal was in the hospital with appendicitis. Poor Cal we are sorry for you.

We were warming up before the show and suddenly they dim the lights of the theatre and one spotlight into Petra and Nick brought the cake and the candles and we sang Happy Birthday. Her reaction, the pleasure that she had for being the center of all the attention it was amazingly funny.

That what I have always liked the most about her, her amazing sense of fun and pleasure and her not shame in showing it.

Lately I think about the first time we play together in Switzerland in Grand Paradise. I had a very good time playing with her and think she also had a good time playing with me but funnily enough we have not played together ever since. I wander why is that?