fatspicblog

So I introduce you to Lena and Jenny the other day and now I am going to tell you what do they want to do.

They want to do a play called Airswiming. This is a play by Charlotte Jones. She is a young play writer that became famous with a play called “The Humble boy” and she is married to Paul Basely. Paul did a show with me in Sheffield many years ago called “The servant of two masters.” At the moment he plays a very funny part in “Benidorm” the TV series.

The play is about two women that are in an asylum for the mentally ill. They have been taken there for two different reasons but both reasons are stupid.
The time when the story happens is at the beginning of the XX century so they suffer from all the conservadurism and bigotry of those years towards women.

The characters are very nice and some times they are even funny but over all I think the play is not great. In order to pull it off you need to very good actresses that have an amazing complicity.

I do not think Jenny and Lena have that complicity but with work they will get it.

The play is also a tragedy with some moments of comedy but I do not think those comedy moments are really funny enough so we will need to create by ourselves other moments when the two actresses could show their funny skills.

Try to read the play and you will tell me what you think. It is not bad but it is very first try out of writing a play.

I have been asked to do some work with two students from Philippe. They were my students from a brief period of time while I was in Paris and now they want to do a show for the Camden People’s Theatre fringe Festival.

When they asked me the first thing I thought was that it was going to be impossible. I am not a director and the other times when I have tried to direct show the whole thing has finished in a very bad way.

But then I like them and I had seen them working in the school and I thought that I should give it a try or at least another try. The only thing that I asked them so we could work together is that for some time we will work a little bit so we would learn if we really like each others away from the school.

We worked in Brighton for one day and it was very good fun. At the end of the day I was ready to work with them but I also told them that they had to do something so I could see the show happening.

Also I was not going to have enough time to work with them because the schedule of Spymonkey was completely full.

A little bit later they came back to me and they say yes. They had accepted my conditions. That made me really happy because that meant to me that they had confidence on me and in what I could do with them.

Jenny and Lena are on English and one German. One of them is small and talented and the other is big and talented. One of them is blonde and the other one is brunette. They both are very pretty and you know me I love working with pretty girls.

They do get alone very well but when you work with someone it is not about getting alone is more about what you are doing and what is best for what you are doing. You and the people involve in the work have to disappeared for the benefit of the show. Or better say you have to find the balance in between your desires and what the show needs.
In that department we are going to be able to do lots. Then is the time for the ideas and in my mind there are not good and bad ideas because even bad ideas you can convert them in good ones it is more about the ability and the openness to make the bad ideas in good ones.

Now I can say that I love Lena and Jenny, they are great.

I know that my friends were really looking forward to have this time to spend some quality family time with their families. (This is a horrible sentence. I know. I have re read it as I have written it but I am not bother. I do not want to change it. I think it is nice to see the mistakes that the writer has done while writing something. So in the first line of this piece I have made a horrible mistake. What would I write if I would re write it better? Perhaps I would have said my friends were looking forward to these few days to spend quality time with their families. That is more like it) Apart from Petra and me they both have families and the time they spend away from them becomes a little bit too painful. I do not exactly know what it means because sadly I do not have a family per se. I have Miren but I do not have little ones to take care of. Petra and me are together in that but it seems to me that she leaves more time to her passion for them when there are some around. I think I have become too self-conscious when kids are around. I use to have lots of fun with them but nowadays I just step back when they are there. I do not want any one to believe that I want them to be mine. Stephan has gone to Vienna. I am going to be there soon to teach a workshop for the Red Clowns and will tell you all about it when it happens. I like Pistachios. Yes, I like them since I saw a James Bond movie and the bad guy was eating them all the time. Of course the action was in Turkey and the fact that he will eat Pistachios all the time made possible that 007 would not got caught into his tramp. So as soon as the movie finished I went and I bought some Pistachios and that is when my affaire with them began. And now, bye bye.

I am in Bilbao. The weather is great. I have walked from my house to Santurce, which is a little village on the other side of the river. Santurce is the traditional fishermen village where it is very typical to go to eat wonderful fish.
For some time now Miren has been working in a freight company in the port of Bilbao sending containers all over the world.

It is really great because it is a challenging job and she tries to do it really well and therefore it get exciting for her.

So when I come to Bilbao for some holydays we try to spend as much time together as possible. And one of the things I do to is to go to eat lunch with her. I go to Santurce and we eat together in a restaurant that has a nice and economical menu.

I think we pay 13 euros and we eat and drink very nicely. Also the room is very nice and we can talk and we can look at each other’s and we can hold hands and we can just be in love like teenager.

Sabotaje is not the name of the restaurant, its name is Cabotaje, which I would love to be able to tell you in English what it means but that is not going to possible because I do not know. If you ask me I do not even know what it means in Spanish anyhow. It is a maritime term. I believe it is something to do with ropes but I could not tell. I chose to call it Sabotaje because I know what it means and it is fun to change the name of things. It sounds similar in Spanish but it means something completely different.

You should try. You should try to change names to things like coat hunger you could call it cliff hunger, that is not funny. It takes a little bit of time to find the right one and that is where the fun is too. Have fun.

It is like miles away, of course Bilbao it is miles away from Sheffield but I took this morning a bus with all these people going to Heathrow and in the station there were lots of people going to see the match that the Sheffield Wednesday was playing this afternoon in London.
I have my suitcase with me and my bag and my coat and it is warm but I have to take everything with me because it is the end of the tour and I do not want to leave anything here.

Then I wander about the right suitcase. I suppose it is different for everybody. Everybody have their own preferences but I think the right suitcase for touring should be a little bit bigger than the weekend one and not so big that it is horrible to carry it all the time around something in between the medium size and the big one. But I did said before. I wander about that because I am taking a bus all the way from Sheffield to Heathrow and it is going to take ages to be there. And I do not have any shit with me to be smoking and make my journey more agreeable.

And now we are in the bus going through the countryside and the bus is full of old people from the North that are going to have their summer holydays in a warmer country.

I fell defeated. I fell tired. I have as my friends do big hopes for this show but we have invested so many times lots of energy in our productions and we still have not really made it. So it has to be this one, it has to be this show the one that put us in a place where we can keep working and making enough money to survive comfortably.

I cannot believe I am thinking in all those things while I am in the airport waiting for my plane to go to Bilbao.

It is going to be very hard to believe that I am going to be in Bilbao in no time and that I am going to be with my wife.

Lyceum is the biggest theatre that there is in Sheffield. In it Vanessa has organised a big gala-even-burlesque to make money to be able to give grants for young people with no money. Vanessa knows us from other things that we have done with her. She likes what we do. Thou she was the other day watching Moby Dick and I am not very sure if she had tones of fun. Thou may be she did.

At the Gala Chris Green is the main character and MC and then there are numbers from Chris, from Ursula, from many more artists that I do not know their names. I know Bradley, he has a double act with his husband where he does ball room dancing, and it is very funny. The highlight is when he becomes a puddle. It is very funny. Also Amy is here. She is great swallowing her swords. There is the hoola-hoop girl from La Clique a there are more acts that as I said before I do not know their names.

The Lyceum is a grand and great theatre. Many years ago I saw here a show with Andrew Sachs. At that time he was my hero for his work playing Manuel in Faulty Towers. He was not great in the show but then he came to see the show that we were doing and talked to us and for me that was just fantastic.

We had a great success really. They laughed so much with our numbers that it was really great to do them. They are difficult ones to do because we are not very fit at the moment. When we created those numbers with Cal we were in a good place. We were quite fit and also we had been resting and not working for a while. That is really great.

Now I am back in the hotel and tomorrow I will be going to Bilbao for some time to have some holydays and time off. It has definitely arrived the right time for all of us to go there.

Sorry I lost the plot. I am tired. It is always the same when you arrive to the end of a tour or something like that. You fell as if you do not want to do all the travelling to go home that you need to rest. I am sitting here wandering when someone will invent the spaced machine that makes people travel from one place to the other, I do not mean a car I mean you go in to a box and makes you appear somewhere else in the world where ever you want. So then I would not need to do all the travel I have to do tomorrow.

It is raining. It is raining non-stop. The venue is a new venue and it looks really cool but it is not a venue for theatre, it is a venue for Rock and Roll and things like that so it is not prepare at all for the things that we are doing. Everything has to be carried up stair by hand and it is a pain and very tiring. Nick and Andy are working very hard, really hard and it is a little bit painful to watch them work and it is giving us a glimpse of what is it going to be to tour with the white monster for the next months or years perhaps.

I have to give a workshop tomorrow and we all are still very involve in finding out what is it that we need for the show to be great and at the same time to make people laugh a lot.

There are many plus thing here thou Charlotte, the lighting tech she is really nice and helpful. Then the guy who runs the venue is also very nice and I think he has done a really nice effort and gesture in bringing us here without seeing the show and also without knowing how have been doing for the last years. He is one of the many that show us with Stiff the first time we ever went to Edinburgh.

I can see the van park down there from here. It is in a very small space next to the other one. I do not think there is enough space for another car to pass through on the road. At least the best thing is that a cul the sac so no one is going to try to go through. It is still raining and we have to do the show.

We arrived yesterday and we are staying all together in this great farm out side of the town. It is brilliant to be there. I woke up this morning and you could not hear anything. The view from my window was great. Then I opened the window and the noises of lots of cars passing by at a very high speed make me shrug. There is a motorway in front of the big field of the house. You cannot see it at first because there is a wall of trees in front of it and at night there are not enough cars to be noisy. So now it fells that we are in the middle of an island of the motorway.

In a way travelling today has been more of a day off than a proper travelling thing. We are so tired that is just the beginning of all the previews tour that we are doing for Spymonkey. In a way it is going to be quite funny to go up the North to make thing there because we have never been there. I have been in Sheffield many years ago and that bring very nice memories.

Travelling is a very overlooked part of touring. It could be very pleasant to see all the views that the country presents you. But it is very long and it is very tiring and you start to see the same views and the same all the time. If anything the good thing in England is that the weather is never very good so you have that sense that they whole landscape is more variable than it really is. Most of the times we do not even have time to see what is going through us when we are in the van.

We all share the driving and let me tell you there are more chances in us being familiar with the services stations of the country than with the middle of towns where we have play two or three times.

Then there is the van, which is never very comfortable. I am sure you all are thinking that by now we should be travelling in one of those Mercedes Vito with big seats and with the comfort abilities of a VIP person. But you would be wrong. Ok, I should say that the first part is right, you are right, I mean, we should be travelling like that but we are not so you are wrong in the second part.
But let me tell you how are we travelling to Barnsley in the North of England. We have a van, a Luton van with all the things related to the show. In that van there are enough places for three of us.
Then we have rented another van to take all the staff that is part of the Cabaret Life of Spymonkey. We are going to be doing a gig in Sheffield after this so we can have three more sits for the team of people working for Spymonkey.

Then when time for dinner arrives we have to stop in a Petrol station and eat sandwiches and drink fuzzy drinks that make us burp and fart the whole time.

So the glamour of travelling with a touring theatre company is not big unless you are rich and then when you travel like a rich person all the glamour does not belong to the touring with a theatre company it belongs to travelling in a rich way.

It always amaze me how reality is bigger better and more surprising than anything we can imagine. I do give some credit to imagination thou but it is just the fact that you can control what you imagine.

We are doing the workshop in an area of Brighton where everybody is very hippy. All the people are quite well off and they live that kind of live where everything is organic and spiritual and it is for the well being of the Universe.

When I arrived this morning everybody was already there. We had had a very nice day yesterday so all the spirits were very high. Of course those spirits made the clowns a little bit insensitive during most of the day but at the end, after some flops and the punishment of the teacher and big enough bunch of them were successful enough to be able to remember the course for a quite a while.

You must forgive me for not remembering the names of clowns that were there. I remember a group of three people that had worked previously with Abigail being particularly good. I am terrible with names. I think I am able to remember them while I am doing the workshop but once the course is finished then my brain delete them.

Of course Nicola, Jenny, Lena, and Sam were very good. The main reason because they fell free to try and that gives them a fantastic freedom. And the second reason is because they are talented and having being working with the real master for the last year that has made the workshop very good by them leading the spirit to go forward and never being scare of failing and flopping.

This has been the first open Spymonkey workshop ever. I have had a very good time and we have had enough people to make worthwhile.

I thank you all out there for coming to work with us and for being so generous and funny.

Spymonkey is giving his first workshop, I mean his first public workshop where people can come to work with us for a week and try to experience what we go through a little bit. That is always the biggest difference that they can not even get closer to what it is to play on the stage in front of an audience but at least they can have some fun pretending and having fun trying to be stupid in front of the people that has attended the workshop and that is why is very important that there is enough people in the class. As I am writing this I am not very sure of how many people do we have?

The inscription has gone through the festival and through us and may be some people will be going there today that have not paid and they are going to pay on the spot.

It all adds to my nerves and my sense of responsibility and lack of confidence that I hold myself. You would have thought that after so many years I would be good at being able to defend myself in front of people? Well, I am but that does not mean that I get nervous and doubts creep on me.

I am going to walk a little bit earlier over there so if there are any problems I have a little bit of time to resolve them. I have checked the address in Google and I know where it is but thou I have been there before I do not think I remember very well how to go there. Now may be I am starting to doubt of myself again but I do not think so in any case I am going to stop writing now so I can go and I can meet everybody there. I know two of the people that are going to be there because I am going to work with them for a while later in the year and they are coming to the workshop. They are not the problem, the problem are the ones I do not know.