fatspicblog

The workshop yesterday made me think. I did not expect to have such a young students. For years now my students have been people like me or people that are interested in our work. Yesterday the students do not know who Philippe Gaulier is. Weird. So I am going to need to know who are they and then try to give them the right amount of information.

As I traveled to Winchester today to give another workshop those were the thoughts in my head.

I arrived there on time and I fell in love with the University and with the fact that there were lots of people studying theatre and performing arts just because they like the subject and with no intention to ever stand up on a stage.

That same thing was the cause why the workshop was cancelled. Only one person came to do the workshop so we had to cancel it. That was sad because after the day before I felt really inspired to show the students that what we do is a very good way of working.

Perhaps I should not say that, what we do is a very valid way of working. That is much better say.

And then we spent the next two hours talking and walking all the way to the station. I would love to tell you the name to the person that came. He is devising a show about a “lighthouse” with his friend that was also going to come to the workshop. They would have some gigs in Brighton, at the Nightingale Theatre in November so go and see it.

When I came back to the Nuffield we had a big meeting about what we were going to do with Petra’s knee.
She has had a very nice night and she has had an endless conversation with her doctor and she was confident that her problem was not going to be as certain as she thought at least for the moment.

So Rohna, the beautiful and funny actress that has come all the way from London to see the show and perhaps play Petra’s part did her journey for nothing. She is really good and I am sure that if ever Petra needs a replacement she is going to be the one. Thanks again Rohna for coming all the way to Southampton.

We did a good show last night. It was fun and it was great to play together having lots of fun.

Those are the kind of shows that make a show be good, the ones that the audiences remember and the ones that the critics write about. Pities there were no critics that night.

I have done a workshop this morning in the lovely university of Winchester. I know I am in Southampton but I took the train and I have gone to Winchester in the morning and I have been working with twenty very fresh students. In fact for them it was the second day in the University ever. That did not help. I should have known better. They did not know anything about acting. In fact they were studying a degree about street arts. In Spain that does not even exists. People do theatre in the streets because there are not theatres where to do it. Well there are but they are used for other things.

At my return we had a big crisis. Petra’s knee was not working properly and after a consultation with her doctor he wrote her an email telling her that she had to have an operation and stay out of a stage for at least six months.

She was completely devastated. We could see in her face how she was thinking that her life was finishing. There was certain anguish in her face and she could not even move as if a big thick cloud a black rain was over her head. It was terrible. It was awful and sad. I write this words and I think this is the life at the front line of comedy and everything that I write lately is always very sad. And that is how it is comedy, like life sometimes is happy and sometimes it is sad.

So the time to perform arrived and the mood was very glum. Petra and we did the show as well as we could but it was a different show. The pace was crap and we were all so careful that it looked as if we just left the hospital and we were forced to do a show still with all the tubes and shit around us.

It is hard and it is not getting easier. The kind of comedy we do makes that we sometimes have accidents and the problem is not so much the accidents but the fact is that we can not recuperate ourselves as fast and as good as before.

So what are we going to do?

Once again I do not have all the details with me while I write my piece and that is what it happens I end up miss spelling the title of the piece.

So here we are in Southampton. Well, I hope that we all are here because in the middle of the afternoon Petra called and she told us that her knee had refused to get well and that she could hardly walk.
We advised her to take it easy because she was not completely necessary at the theatre. The thought in all of us was simply “will she be able to make it tomorrow?”  “Would doctor theatre make things right? It is completely terrible just to consider that she would not be able to do the show tomorrow.

The theatre is great and I think that many people would come to see the show. The theatre is in the middle of the campus and there are lots of people around.

Also to say that we are all staying in digs from the list of Digs that theatre gave us.

I am staying with the Struthers. They are lovely couple that has some spare rooms and they rented to starving actors who come to do shows in Southampton.

I was a little bit concern at the beginning because I am a foreign and we always are not very good with foreign. But they have been really, really welcoming and I am very happy in their house.

We have spent the afternoon at the theatre going through the video of the show and we have arrived to very good conclusions that we are going to try to resolve tomorrow while we do the show. We would have a rehearsal and then we would put them in the show as soon as possible.

Now tomorrow I have to teach a workshop in Winchester so it is going to be a very long and interesting day.

We have been driving for two hours now. We left Northampton at 12 and we are still on the road. The monster is going to Southampton were it would play for the next week. The monster, the white whale is so big that we need two Luton vans to take everything from theatre to theatre.

Today is Andy and Nick in one and Stephan and me in the other one. It is silly but the luck has not been in our side and Stephan and me are in the slow one and Andy and Nick are in the fast one. Believe me when I say this because they are going 70 or 80 miles per hour and we are not being able to go more than 50. The van does not really move. It is being a relentless journey.

Twenty minutes ago we stopped in a brewery in a town close to Southampton. The brewery where they do the beer called Coors. For a moment Stephan and me thought that Nick was taking us to drink beer. We were completely wrong.

We have gone there to weight the vans. The vans have a limited weight they can transport and because we are going to be traveling to many places around England we have to be sure that we are legal.

Our surprise was quite big because we had gone over the limit.

But I will not talk about that any more because it is not good.

And then I said, I need to eat. I was really hungry. So we stopped in the Pheasant Pluckier. As I stepped out of the van I was salivating. It was a beautiful place that looked great for a roasted lunch. I also noticed that an old man was taking inn the sign outside for Sunday Roasted into the pub. This normally means that they have stopped serving.

Of course we were late. The man told us to go a little bit further a long the road and we would find another pub where they never close the kitchen. When someone tells you that I think that is a bad sign. Yes, because the respect for the food they cooked is less. It is not always like that but in this case it was true. I had the roast and it was not great. They had a great garden and we stayed there eating under the sun but … I wish the food had been better.

During last night I had a revelation. I am sure I should have had this revelation some time ago my pears would say but it just got to me last night.

Yes, it did not make me happy. I was in bed and thanks to an angel I realized that what we were at had stop being a game. I always thought it was going to be a game that we play to have fun. Sometime ago stopped being that because … there are so many reasons and every single person who takes part in this has their own valid ones.

The fact that it did stop being a game has affected my perception of what is all about. Has it?

This revelation brings lots of new questions about everything that Spymonkey do? At least that I do with Spymonkey.

At first, when I was in bed and the revelation came to me I got scared. How long have I been upsetting my colleagues with my insensitivity? Have I been behaving wrong for a very long time? Would I be able to be forgiven? So I turned in my bed and I turned in my bed.

And then this morning I realized that everybody has a different time to get things and that we just have to respect that.

I will have to apologize. So I am going to do it just right now.

I have apologized now and I am part of the world of no game.

This will means that my blog would be more bias now than it has been before. Well, not really. It was always very bias but now I will not be one thing and Spymonkey another thing, from now on I will be just part of Spymonkey.

Everything has become important because what we do it is too important and jokes and silly things are not acceptable when the food that goes to our table depends on that. So I will see you all soon.

“ There is a kind of comedy that simply wants to hear laughter. It may be, deep down, that analysts could uncover a fatal unhappiness or a sense of failure in these comics that is only soothed by the laughter of strangers. And surely we have had clowns who have worn that dysfunction on puffed-up sleeves- Tony Hancock was such a sad fellow and the sadness killed him long before the end. The deliriously funny Kenneth Williams lamented Hancock’s pomp and pretension in his diaries- and could not help but reveal his own near insanity. Whereas, Morecombe and Wise (until someone disillusions me- and please don’t try to hard) gave every impression of being silly comedians content with a very silly world who sought to wipe away our wounds in laughter. Look, they said, I’ll make you laugh – it’s grand as a view.”

David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film The Guardian.

For me this David Thomson thoughts about what is going on with Spymonkey all over.

After many years of working fantastically well with the great Cal McCrystal we developed a sense that in comedy what counts is the laughs that you get from the audience. I believe that is the case and that should be the case.

But contrary with what I’ve just said I always get the felling there may be something else. When I write this it fells as if to make people laugh is easy enough, well, it is not therefore why we will bother in trying to achieve something else? Is it something that in our minds it is better? I wander.

It is difficult to understand even for me. But I think that we believe surrounded in a world of “straight” people. I do not mean that in a sex orientation but more into the comedy appreciation. So, we fell obliged to fulfill their expectations because to leave just in the world of the “idiot” it can be lonely and hard.

All these thoughts come to my mind while we make sure the show is good. The show is not good yet. They will kill me for saying this but it is true. You come to see it and I think you will have fun but it is not the show we want yet. We are working on it all the time and everybody comes tell us what to do. We get many notes from everybody.

Glynish came yesterday and she enjoyed the show. She was very nice and helpful.

Now we are doing rehearsals and gigs and it is all getting a little bit too much if you ask me. We did two shows yesterday and that is a real killer. We were completely destroyed after the second one but I could not go to bed until one o’clock. This is sick.

It’s shorter than the book, it’s funnier than the book, it’s got more visual gags, ventriloquist’s dolls, disco-dancing sea creatures and singing mermaid mastheads than the book. But will this latest spoof from the comedy-theatre quartet Spymonkey be their masterpiece, their The Play What I Wrote, after more than a decade of very physical, very funny mucking around?

Not quite. Moby Dick is gloriously anarchic, constantly entertaining, yet falls tantalisingly short of the sort of comic control that would make it more than the sum of its parts. What parts, though. The team’s different styles complement each other beautifully. There’s the beaming, heavily accented Spaniard Aitor Basauri, who plays Ishmael, the narrator — “My English is a little bit special,” he confides, “so you have to pay more attention.” There’s the handsome Brit Toby Park. He knows that stiff-backed archness alone won’t win the day as Captain Ahab — but it will give his castmates plenty to play off and undercut.

There’s the grey-haired German Stephan Kreiss, slipping between crazy characters such as Queeuqeeg or Starbuck — and repeatedly slipping, in one of the funniest routines I’ve seen all year, off the sloped deck of the Pequod, their boat. And there’s the athletic, unlikely Petra Massey who races around in scarlet wig and rubber rings, joining the boys to dance a sailor’s jig, forcing her way into this macho yarn. “I should have read the book,” she says. “I didn’t know there weren’t any women’s parts.”

The show follows Herman Melville’s story, but stops and plays whenever it finds a bit of business it likes. Lucy Bradridge and Graeme Gilmour’s impressive boat set helps them to be evocative of 1841 Nantucket when they want, just plain stupid when they don’t. They offer up then undercut every dramatic convention they can, but the jokes are never cheap because their skill is so apparent. They’re continental clowning meets Pythonesque parody; the Marx Brothers meets Complicite.

Jos Houben, a co-founder of Complicite, directs with one eye on the gag, the other on the story. After a while he gets a bit cross-eyed. The second half’s setpieces, including the burly Basauri in a clinging white whale suit, take over the narrative. There’s a few minutes between Ahab and Starbuck left deliberately joke-free. You can see why they want to vary the pace, but it puts the show off-kilter.

Perhaps a certain messiness is the price of so much inspired comic misrule. The metaplot about the actors putting on the show remains only piecemeal. The show should tighten as it tours, though it may need to go back into the dock to fulfil its massive potential. But let’s not carp too much: for most of its voyage, Moby Dick will give you a whale of a time.

Box office 01604 624811, to Sept 26, then touring to Nov 7. www.spymonkey.co.uk

Spymonkey’s Moby Dick, currently opening a nationwide tour at Royal&Derngate, Northampton, must be the funniest show on any stage in Britain at the moment.

Given the company’s global reach, that accolade will soon, no doubt, read ‘anywhere in the world’. It really is that brilliant. Sly and witty, deftly debunking theatrical conventions at every turn, full of brilliantly-executed physical comedy, with warm and winning turns from a company of four magnificent performers, it is an absolute must-see.
There are knowing panto touches which have the audience acting as winds and waves in the remix version of the famous tale of one man’s obsession. There are elements of burlesque and variety filtered through Pythonesque characters and situations. How clever, for instance, to have the narration from a native Spaniard with a less-than convincing grasp of English – so from the go the story is as unintelligible as many think the original Melville tome is.

But critical analysis aside, it is just so laugh-out-loud funny at every turn. The show has been created by the performers, Aitor Basauri, Petra Massey, Toby Park and Stephan Kreiss, with input from director and associate director Jos Houben, a Theatre de Complicite veteran, and Rob Thirtle.

Aitor Basauri continually conspires with the audience against Ahab (aka the actor manager star) and brings the timing of the best stand-ups to his job of narration with odd echoes of a certain waiter from Barcelona – and he is an awesome giant of the deep.

Toby Park, also responsible for the original music, pulls off the neat trick of combining the irascible chutzpah of Sir Donald Wolfit with The Carpenters (no, really) and Stephan Kreiss redefines the meaning of physical comedy with every step he tries to take. Wonderful.

Petra Massey is the most disconcerting and funniest nutter you’re ever likely to see, combining it with authentic rapping, acrobatics and bizarre puppetry as well as penning and performing a self-penned vocal meditation on the chances of the ship’s figurehead becoming pregnant. Magnificent.

The finale, which I won’t divulge, is an absolute, gobsmacking knock-out, at once hilarious, uplifting and utterly ludicrous.

Go here for tour details, but it’s at Northampton until September 26.

Thanks to all at Spymonkey and Royal&Derngate for co-producing yet another smash hit which made two hours fly by.
This is from the Birminghan Post like today or yesterday.

There are always things about opening a show that never change. There is always a combination of nerves and excitement. Then there is the felling that you have been doing this for a very long time and you can not really find the nerves, the adrenaline, the fear that things are not going to happen as we have planed and then the fact that everybody that is out there is ready to find out what are you going to do.

We did a light run through were everything was going very well. We were very light and funny and many things that normally do not work in the show suddenly in silly rehearsals were working very well. How can that be possible?
I know that it is a very stupid question if you are an actor. You do know that everything is better in rehearsals than anything that we end up doing on the stage. And it is just rarely that we manage to put everything on the stage and everybody sees the show of his or her lives. I wish that could be so free all the time but we are not.

I made the mistake of having a can of Red Bull in between the two half and then when the whole thing finished I was so awake and tired that I thought I was going to sleep very well but not… I was awake until late, very late, it was five thirty, and I was reading my book as if I just had gone into bed.

And it is not easy to be ready to do a show and then have lots of fun and then be tired and sleep.
Today was a good day but the thing that touch was that we still have lots of work to do in the show. It could be a very good show but needs to be worked out more. Then once we have given to it the extra mile then the show has all the possibilities to be a very good show.

And I wake up in the morning very rested. My body fell more and more tired and destroyed. In a way it is trying to tell me that I am old and that I am not getting any younger. I throw myself around as if I still will be 21 and I am 40. I am sure part of my stupidity comes from the fact that I am unable to live my live according to the age I have.

We did work thou. I worked with Petra for a couple of hours in a little dance piece that we do at the end of the show. She was felling menstrual and… women are great, and greater when their period comes so I did everything we could and she did too to keep friends and worked together at the same time.

Stephan was in his house the whole time. He was really tired and he has been a little bit sick since he came to be here in England and start to rehears the last leg of the show.

Toby took the train to Brighton. At the moment the family is the most important thing for him so he tries to be there with them as much time as possible. He will be coming back tomorrow in the train to prepare the opening of the show and give the show the last touches with all of us.

Meanwhile Petra and me will be watching telly and doing things that you do when you are 21. Perhaps it is because we do not have kids and we do not have big responsibilities to take care off. So we laid down in the sofas of our apartments and steer to the TV for hours until our brain and our body was equally rested.