Clowns without pants

>> Spymonkey’s brand of British/European comedy, set in a 1960s spooky mansion, includes nudity, kung fu and religious mockery

MONKEY BUSINESS: The cast of Cooped

by AMY BARRATT

If the four performers in Spymonkey refer to themselves as clowns, you shouldn’t picture red noses and big pants. In fact, no pants at all would be closer to the mark.

When I reached Petra Massey by phone in London, she was on a break from rehearsals to whip Spymonkey’s smash hit show Cooped into shape for the Just for Laughs Festival. A collective creation by Spymonkey, their director Cal McCrystal and designer Lucy Bradridge, Cooped is a spoof of a certain kind of gothic novel, or B-movie: a sweet young girl goes to work for a rich, dashing recluse in his spooky mansion. Spymonkey sets the Rebecca-like tale in the 1960s, thus allowing Massey to wear white gogo boots. Her character gets caught up in the drama of the household and also begins falling for the master, all of which makes her feel, you guessed it: cooped.

“Because we’re beginning with a structure that’s familiar, we can go off on all sorts of tangents and people can still follow,” says Massey. And certainly, if you watch a video clip on their Web site (spymonkey.co.uk), they do go off: into nudity, song-and-dance, kung fu, farting and religious mockery, to name a few.

While the Just for Laughs people are plugging Spymonkey as quintessentially British comedy, in fact troupe members are Spanish (Aitor Basauri, a ringer for Peter Sellers) and Swiss German (Stephan Kreiss: think Lurch from the Addams Family) as well as Brit (Massey and Toby Park, a comedian/musician who writes original songs for their shows). All have studied with French clown-meister Philippe Gaulier, and all met in Switzerland while performing in a “James Bond-style spectacular” called Karl’s Kühne Gassenschau. So despite persistent comparisons to Monty Python, and even Benny Hill, there’s a case to be made that this is a quintessentially European company. They have performed their physical brand of comedy from Melbourne to Budapest, Calgary to Athens, making new fans wherever they’ve gone.

They’ve spent time in Montreal before, notably in rehearsal with Cirque du Soleil for the “erotic” Las Vegas show Zumanity. McCrystal was hired by the Cirque to put together the clown segments of the show, and he went straight to Spymonkey, who in turn signed on immediately because it was Cal. The collaboration with the Cirque was not entirely a happy one, but it was lucrative.

“We all bought houses [in Vegas],” says Massey. “I had a lovely ranch with a swimming pool. Before that, I was literally squatting in London.”

The troupe’s policy of putting 10 per cent of their earnings back into the company allowed them to do the bigger, better version of Cooped that they’d been dreaming of since premiering it in 2001. Reviews everywhere have been absurdly good, referring to the show as “jaw-achingly funny” and “so funny it would be ridiculous to miss it.”

“[Just for Laughs] is a festival we’ve always wanted to do,” says Massey, whose wide smile and twinkly eyes (the video clips again) make her look made for mischief.

“You’ve got a fantastic line-up there: all the stand-ups who were our buddies when we were at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. So we’re looking forward to seeing all our mates.”