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.