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Spymonkey


Spymonkey is an international comedy and physical theatre company, based in Brighton. Its members are Toby Park and Petra Massey, both British, Aitor Basauri, a Spaniard, and Stephan Kreiss, a German. According to the theatre director, Tom Morris, ‘Spymonkey follow a rich comic tradition which runs from Tommy Cooper through Morecambe and Wise to Reeves and Mortimer. They are clowns supreme, the high priests of foolery.' For Julian Crouch of Improbable Theatre, they are ‘groundbreaking and sharply brilliant, Spymonkey dance along the very boundary of artistic bravery. They take big risks in their work, and manage to be both true to a highly experimental process AND take their audience with them on that journey.'

Park, Massey and Basauri met in 1997, when they were working with the Swiss action-theatre group Karl's Kühne Gassenschau in Zurich. The following year, in Brighton, they created their first show Stiff with Paul Weilenmann (their former boss at KKG), the director Cal McCrystal and the designer Lucy Bradridge. When Wielenmann left, Spymonkey advertised for a 'funny German' to replace him and, in 2000, found Stephan Kreiss. McCrystal later recalled, 'We made him do Hitler impressions to see if he had a sense of humour. And he did them really, really well.'

Park, Massey, Basauri, Kreiss and McCrystal all trained with the French master clown, Philippe Gaulier. Spymonkey's first shows were co-created with McCrystal, who helped shape their stage personas. In a 2013 interview, Park said, 'He really put the company together in terms of defining how the four of us work together on stage, the status relationships and comedic interplay between the four of us, what we would term our clowns....They are basically bits of the four of us which have been through the Cal McCrystallographier and exploded, warped and expanded into oversized cartoon-like dimensions. But they are all rooted in a bit of truth. I am and remain slightly pretentious and pompous in my artistic ambitions, but I look good in a suit. Stephan really doesn’t give an arse whether he’s pissing us off or not, he remains an anarchist, very unpredictable. Aitor would always like to be considered a great serious theatre actor rather than a very funny Spaniard, and will be very upset if you laugh at him when he is being serious.'


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