I can honestly say I don’t miss any of it,” says Spymonkey’s Petra Massey of her company’s most bizarre adventure to date. “The swimming pools, maybe, the parties, never, the prosthetic penises we had to leave behind, well yes. Other than that, all I can say is that we’re really, really happy to be home, and we can’t wait for Edinburgh.”
Spymonkey are back at the festival, after an enigmatic hiatus of five years, with an extended version of Cooped. A determinedly ridiculous spoof of a Gothic novella, in which a strange, introverted genius, Forbes Murdstone, and his clique of oddball European staff, welcome a passionate, innocent young woman into their malevolent fold, Cooped earned the foursome rapturous critical acclaim and a global tour when it first hit the festival in 2001.
It was also the springboard for a three-year residency in Las Vegas, performing with one of the largest entertainment companies in North America: the seemingly unstoppable Cirque du Soleil. “They asked our director, Cal McCrystal, to direct the clowns for their adult, erotic show, Zumanity,” explains Massey’s chiselled, deadpan cohort Toby Park, sheepishly. “And we were his first choice.” McCrystal has been with the company since its inception, directing and co-devising its first show, Stiff, which opened in Edinburgh in 2000. Together with European counterparts Aitor Basauri and Stephan Kreiss, Spymonkey earned themselves a Total Theatre award for their demented, neatly choreographed clowning antics, strung together on the loosest of funereal plots, which they developed for Cooped the following year.
“And then Cal asked us to go to Vegas,” Park explains. “We thought really carefully about it but we weren’t all that worried, because we’d be working with him. We didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into when we said yes.”
Vegas is the fastest-growing city in America; the second fastest in the world. It’s a town in which the New York skyline and the Eiffel Tower have been re-created as hotels, or, in Vegasese, “entertainment complexes” replete with a choice of thousand-seat theatres, spas, and tier upon tier of 24-hour casinos. It seems an unlikely home for a downbeat European fringe company who met in a circus in Switzerland and devised Stiff atop a French mountain.
Listening to their tales of tacky, superficial glamour and backstage agony, it seems that Vegas proved the best and the worst of times for the company. Rehearsing in the enormous Cirque du Soleil complex in Montreal was, according to Massey, “the time of our lives. We came up with some of our best material ever and the sets they built us were just mind-blowing.”
Then a month before they were due to open, “They fired the producer who had brought us over. It became a horrible, horrible experience,” Park winces at the memory. “Nobody creatively understood what we were trying to do or liked us at all. They’d spent thousands of dollars on these sketches that were ready to go, really funny, silly stuff, and then they just came by one day and cut it all. Just like that.”
“We had two weeks to prepare. They threw us on stage with nothing.” Massey chips in: “There we were, in this $70 million theatre in Vegas, improvising our a**** off in front of all these VIPs they’d invited for the opening.”
And? “We bombed,” Park replies calmly. “Not just us,” Massey adds. “The whole show died. They fired so many people they didn’t have a finale, so they used our pompom routine. It’s a good piece, but it’s not a finale for a big Vegas show. Four fat ugly Europeans coming on with pompoms, in the nude.”
“We didn’t know quite how fat and ugly we were until we got to Vegas,” says Park. “It took us time to get the energy right and to understand the audience. It sounds like a cliché to say that Middle America doesn’t get irony, but we found out that it’s true. Unfortunately we found that out on stage in front of thousands of people.”
By the end of their two years, they felt they had a great show. “And the sketches Cirque cut because they thought they were too rude were way tamer than what we did at the end,” says Massey. “We were absolutely filthy, but the audience loved it.”
It seems amazing that a town dubbed Sin City might raise an eyebrow at the antics of four fat, ugly Europeans, but, Park explains: “One of the paradoxes of Vegas is that sexual morality is enforced by the Nevada Liquor Board: you’re not allowed to be nude if there’s alcohol served on the premises.”
“For our pompom routine I fought tooth and nail for us to be naked, but no way,” explains Massey. “So at vast Cirque du Soleil expense the boys had to have these prosthetic penises while I had to wear a merkin, a little G-string made of someone else’s pubic hair. Sometimes real penises would pop out and everybody would get all jittery because the show could be closed down.”
It wasn’t, and, as an impressive array of celebrity snaps proves, Spymonkey moved in the very best of Vegas circles. Pamela Anderson, Duran Duran, Bette Midler and Demi Moore were, Park says, “absolutely horrified to meet us. All the beautiful people they’d actually come backstage to invite to their parties were still in makeup, so they got us. We were never in the cool gang.”
“We tried,” Massey counters, “but it never really worked.” And when at the end of the two years Cirque offered them another contract, “none of us batted an eyelid turning all that money down,” Massey says. “It’s not worth it. It’s too mad.” Park reflects: “We had a great time, and the weirdness of the environment really pulled us together as a group. But it wasn’t the right place for us at all. You spend years trying to scrape by with no money and you think if only we had a bit more we could do all the things we wanted. But we found out that money doesn’t help, sometimes it’s actively a hindrance.”
The new Cooped, Park promises, is very much Spymonkey business as usual. The previews we’ve done of it in Brighton were just incredible. We thought we’d be forgotten in England, but in fact there’s a huge amount of support for us here. We really felt we were coming back to our roots.”
In December, the company starts work on its new show, Bless, about the lives of the saints. The costume budget will be a pittance compared to what they had at Cirque du Soleil, but no one is complaining: “There’s one new scene in Cooped which Cirque cut from Zumanity,” Massey explains. “They’d built us this insanely expensive set and then just axed it. Well, we couldn’t keep any of the props, but do you know what? We’ve built something for about a fiver which works just as well.”
Park nods in agreement: “That’s the Spymonkey method.”
Cooped is showing at the Edinburgh Fringe’s Assembly rooms until Aug 28 (www.spymonkey.co.uk 0131-226 2428
