Appendix

My Interview With Cal

Friday 29^th November, 2002.

I’d like to start with Acting. And I don’t want to go over anything you did with Phillip because I can just quote his for those things. I was hoping you could expand on when you first came to clown; when you did Byland and subsequently Gaulier. What was so attractive about clowning?

Well, I can’t remember what I said to Phillip Beaven now but… I do remember that I had no idea of what clowning was when I went to do this Byland thing and I just did it because a friend of mine said, ‘let’s do it.’ She’d done a bit of clowning at LAMDA. But I didn’t really like it and every day I thought, ‘I’m not going back, I’m not going back to that bloody… I don’t need that. And I was mainly terrified that I’d find out that I wasn’t funny. Or that somebody who was a kind of guru would say to me – ‘you’re not funny.’ And I found out that it’s not really like that. People can’t really say that to you. And nobody said it, although I didn’t do brilliantly in that Byland thing, I was kind of in the middle group. There was a duffers group and there were tow middle groups and then there was a really good group. And I wasn’t in the good group. And I found it very difficult, it was really hard.

What kind of thing did he do?

Byland is different from Philippe in that he’s very circus based. So you would spend a whole morning doing falls, learning different kinds of falls. Another morning learning different kinds of slaps and you’d go home with red faces after that because you’d been slapped all day long by your partner. And so, he’d do a whole morning just doing tricks with hats and things. So he’d do the clown staple, the very basic clown techniques. Then in the afternoons it would be ‘find your own clown’ and that would be improvisations in groups or ones and twos and things like that.

Was the basis of finding your own clown the same as with Gaulier? From you?

Kind of. Yeah. You put on a stupid costume, which he doesn’t give you –you just find it yourself – and you get up and you try to be funny without doing anything. The first exercise we did was that ‘come in and be funny’. Which I think Gaulier does first as well. Which I don’t do first. So, as a performer, it was kind of hard but all of us were in the same boat and lunchtimes all of us were just sitting there and eating our soup with our hands over our faces, ashamed of how we’d flopped. Completely ashamed. It was torture. And every day I had to make myself go back.

My only experience of clown workshops is Mick. But he used his role as the authority figure, if someone flopped, in order to milk a laugh out of it so that people wont feel completely ashamed.

Well, I do that as well. That’s very interesting. But the big ‘guru’ people don’t do that. Philippe doesn’t do it, and Byland didn’t do it. In fact, Gaulier delights in the flop. He delights. If somebody has a really horrible time, he’s delighted. He teaches too long and hard to actually involve himself with, ‘ooh, I’d better save this person’s feelings.’ And, arguably, he’s right. Because maybe the way I deal with it, and the way Mick deals with it, is more about us and less about what’s good for the student. It’s different in a way. I don’t have a school, Mick doesn’t have a school. So people who come and do a workshop with me when I rarely do them. They’re only with me for a week or two weeks. And I don’t want them to go away from that feeling, ‘Oh. I hate clown.’ I want them to feel that they really love it and that they want to do more of it. Gaulier has people for a longer amount of time so he doesn’t need to be so motherly about it.

Can you describe how the exploratory work when you first teamed up with Spymonkey led to Toby’s ‘I’m not funny’?

As I remember, the four of them had joined forces to make a clown show with me. At the time I think their greatest objective was to develop their craft and have fun with friends. A successful tour would be a bonus. I had done a one week workshop with them several months before beginning rehearsals. At
that time I was experimenting with character more. I was looking at the worst types you would want to leave your mother’s body with. There was a slightly sadistic edge to some of the work. Toby was cast as Mark Park the embalmer. A deep lisping voice and a brooding, serial killer type personality. This
yielded some funny results but it was not truthful. Petra had a strong tendency to play character too. Very Julie Walters type stuff. It took me a long time to get rid of this too. Paul Wiellenmann was brilliant in rehearsal. Never had a flop. Had me crying with laughter every day. Much of his stuff remains in the show. But he lost confidence before we opened and he was not good. Aitor was Aitor.

I had seen Toby perform before and saw someone who was desperately keen but equally ineffective and slightly embarrassing to watch. As I suspected, it became clear during the games I played to develop clown, designed to expose their inadequacies, that Toby was in a different world from the others. The world of not funny. I wasn't sure how to deal with this. It was a painful pattern of failure every day. My encouraging smiles were not productive. Toby's morale was drooping after a couple of weeks and he visibly began to despair. It was in an attempt to rupture the pattern by confronting the truth that I asked him to admit he wasn't funny. I had a small idea that it would yield something but I didn't know where I would take it from there and I was getting slightly desperate myself. I asked Toby to stand in front of the group. I told him to say to us "I'm not funny" I said I didn't want just the words but to see in his eyes that he knew it was true. Coming at a time when he felt at rock bottom this was extremely traumatic. It took a quite a while for him to gather himself. When he finally said the words we started to laugh. He was unaffected by our reaction and went on tearfully describing his torment. We laughed till our tears flowed. What had happened was so strong that I realised we had a hook for the show. AND a way of using Toby in a clown show.

Because of this Stiff was the first show I directed that included any real pathos. (My work with Peepolykus had been purely zany type knockabout. Though there was certainly potential there particularly with John Nicholson. There is a dark underlying sentiment in I Am A Coffee about bullying but we don't point it. It was too near the truth for John (and he has banned this show from the repertoire). After we opened Stiff Toby got many many laughs. He then decided he had found his clown and began surfing the laughs in a knowing way. I had several heated confrontations with him about this. He said I wasn't allowing him to have fun. I said I wasn't allowing him to show the audience he was having fun which is quite different. In Cooped I jiggled with the characters so that Aitor took some of the burden of status from Toby. I also gave Toby a twin character to play so he would feel less stuck in a groove. This was necessary for their development but it has created quite a flaw in the show in that we don't really have a consistent Chef character.

Do you think there’s a connection between good acting and good clowning?

Acting isn’t really a tangible thing that you can qualify. It’s just opinions. But one thing that I personally think, and a lot of people who write about acting agree with this, is that good acting is about truth and clowning is about truth as well. As an actor, you can kind of do anything and go anywhere, but if it’s based in truth then you’ll do a good performance. And clowning is the same. That’s an awfully wide description of the similarities. But it is about honesty and it’s about simplicity as well.

Your work, certainly with Spymonkey – it often seems it’s about, more than whatever the content of the show is, it’s about four clowns putting on the show. And the implicit truth in that is that we know they are performing for us.

Yes. It’s not trying to cover up the obvious truth that somebody is onstage performing. But that isn’t important for every different type of theatre. It’s not important to show the audience, in order to be truthful, that you’re an actor. And I think that possibly one of the main reasons why my shows are as they are is because of why I became an actor, which was not because I thought, ‘I’d love to become an actor and interpret somebody’s text, I think I’d really love to do that.’ I don’t know how many actors think like that but maybe some. Or a lot of actors think, ‘ooh, I don’t feel very comfortable, how can I express myself? Funnily enough, when I was in that school play I felt really good.’ For me, whenever I got up onstage, I was doing that, ‘It’s meeee!!’ kind of thing. So, I became a performer, actor, because I like being looked at, I like being onstage. So it’s a personal truth for me that I like that. I always just saw the play as just a vehicle for me to show off in. And I think few actors would admit that but most actors probably do that. But to what degree? A lot of actors that might be their starting off point but then they get terribly involved in the message of the play and you hear actors talk about the message and wanting to make the audience think and I have no such ambitions at all. I want the audience to leave the theatre going, ‘He was marvellous!’ ‘He was so funny!’ ‘What a talented guy!’ And if they don’t like the play, they don’t like the play, I don’t care.

The thing of the show being a vehicle for attention seeking; Would it be fair to say that, in the shows you direct, the content is less important than the style? It’s about the game, it’s about the clowning and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s ‘about’ death or ‘about’ a Gothic Romance Novella.

Yes. I’d say that’s true. Because I think that you can have wonderful content and if it’s not performed well then it wont be a good show. But, if you have terrible content and wonderful performances it can still be a good show.

Something Mick said was that the material in a clown show is always bad.

It is. Good material is for comedians. Bad material is for clowns. Good jokes are for comedians so if you have a good joke in a clown show – and I think some of my jokes like ‘we’re a very Klaus family’ are good, and they’re kind of accidentally good, they’re silly good. But that’s not the point. I remember, with Peepolykus, when we were doing Horses for Courses, we were trying to do a restaurant scene. We’d tried to do a restaurant scene before in another show and it hadn’t worked so we thought we’d try again with Horses for Courses and we did this restaurant scene and, actually, it worked extremely well. But it was terribly funny and it was very verbally funny. The difficulty with it was that it was like a sketch, a very long sketch, that you’d see on TV. And it was difficult to play because it was good. And we thought of loads of really funny endings for it but they were all, ‘boom boom!’ endings. They were all sketch endings. We had three different ending that really made us laugh but we thought - we can’t! The only thing you can do at this ending is to snap out the lights and say, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, you’ve been great, thank you very much!’ It was too kind of light entertainment. So we had to ruin the end of the sketch in order that it remained clown.

Out of personal desire to keep to the rules of clown? Or because it was funnier to ruin it?

We found a funny way of ruining it. It was as funny. We knew that the other endings that we’d thought of for this sketch, the audience would have absolutely roared, but it would have twisted the show into something else. At that point with Peepolykus we were doing absolutely pure clowning – there was nothing else going on. It was much much purer clowning than I do with Spymonkey.

What’s purer clowning?

Well. We were observing the rules of clown and not going too far beyond them. Like Stiff is purer clown than Cooped because Cooped contains elements of spoof and actually the actors in Cooped are all much cleverer. It is clown show, but they’re quite clever clowns. All the characters in Stiff are far more stupid; they have much less to say. There isn’t really, as far as we can see, a script. In Cooped they’re actually playing a script, for the most part. And Stiff, the clowns, you can see that there was a script or that there should be a script but you can see that the actors are not using the script. They just decide either, I can’t remember what my line is, or I don’t feel like saying that line and I’m going to say this because it’s going to be better. And they just do what they want.

So with Peepolykus you never get the sense there is a script?

One thing Peepolykus excel at is, ‘everything’s gone wrong and we don’t know how to get it back.’ Because there are certain jokes like David will say, ‘Let us introduce ourshelves. Ourshelves? I’ve got three in the kitchen.’ They’ll do something stupid like this. Now it’s just a slip of the tongue, but that will be in the show every night. And people are always really surprised. They are with Spymonkey as well but with Peepolykus to a greater extent, they’re always really surprised that that stupid little slip of the tongue is actually part of the show. David particularly loves to digress so it looks like he’s digressed for five minutes and then it gets back to the show and then it just starts another digression. So the Peepolykus shows looked more like they were being made up as they went along … than the Spymonkey shows do. And that is because Spymonkey are not as experienced performers and so I have to give them what I call life rafts, which are set pieces which you put in the show. We used very few set pieces in Peepolykus; there was the biscuits (Mick’s thing) and the bread scene. These life rafts that people can grab hold of. With Spymonkey, I put lots of things in. Like the pop-song and the Jews and the naked scene.

Does that come down to you generating more material with Spymonkey and Peepolykus generating more of their own?

I generate a lot of material with Peepolykus. I think probably I generated a little bit more with Spymonkey than Peepolykus but not significantly. Actually no, because David is a really good writer and he came up with a lot of material. Javier does as well but he doesn’t do it until the show’s actually up and running. You don’t get lots from him in rehearsal, you get more when the show’s up. But also Peepolykus would insist and fight with me about things they didn’t agree with or they didn’t want to do and we fought really hard until we found something we were all happy with. Spymonkey don’t fight. I say something and they all believe me and that’s it. And so, therefore, I tend to have more of my stuff in their shows because I can.

Talking about the sense that a show is being made up as it goes along. Is it possible for good clowns to literally do that.

Yes. If you have experienced people who know what they want and what they want is good then the director can take a different role. For instance, in Peepolykus, there’s an imbalance. Two of the performers are very happy with their clowns and one doesn’t like his clown and tries to play something else. The biggest problem I would find with Peepolykus is they would all try to rush into the same corner. And when you know the dynamic and it’s clear what the dynamic of the group is. But all three performers want to be Javier. Javier is in the right corner. So I found one of the most difficult things I had to do with them was stretch them all into their places, and keep them in that triangle so they’re all equally balanced. One thing I didn’t like about Goose Nights was that they were all in the same corner and their relationship wasn’t as interesting. And some of the stuff that they did with each other was very good but the relationships weren’t as interesting in the show because they were all in the Javier corner.

Who directed Goose Nights?

I don’t know .. some woman … I think David had a big hand in directing it. I feel that the relationships that we put in, certainly in I am a Coffee and Horses for Courses, were really good for the company. Because David is the chief. It’s funny because he said, ‘I’m not being the chief this time’, in Horses for Courses, and I said, ‘Fine. That’s Good. I’ll make John the chief.’ And so we started working like this but it was clear within, not even two hours, that David kept climbing back onto the chief’s position all the time. And I kept saying, ‘You’re taking over the scene, you’re playing the chief,’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, yes you’re right. Thank you. I mustn’t do that.’ But I knew that it would naturally … he would see that there’s no other way for it. And if you see that show now, you see that John comes on and presents the show at the beginning, as the minister of culture, and David is sitting in the audience and heckles him all the way through and then just gets up onstage and takes over. And that’s kind of how we worked on it. A lot of things happen and then the politics of the rehearsals go into the show.

You’ve said that David’s the only genius clown you know who can play white and red clown. Is he more tempted to climb into the role of chief?

He naturally does. Another thing I did with David was this television workshop where he was playing a very stupid South American prison guard. And he took over every single scene. He’s quite unique, his clown is so pro-active that, even when he was with… The woman who was playing his boss was actually quite a high and mighty TV star, she didn’t stand a chance. And in the script he’s supposed to be scared of her but he doesn’t play that; he’s so high status. She didn’t stand a chance. He’s brilliant at high-statusing people. And he and Javier are a very good match for each other because Javier can actually out-status David but only because Javier just doesn’t give a shit. If someone’s clown is the clown that doesn’t give a shit then you can’t do anything. You can’t out-status that person.

But, you always need the director to clarify their roles and to say, ‘you are this and you are this’ - because rarely in a company do they know: everybody runs to the same corner, everybody wants to be the most stupid. You always need the director. I don’t know because, I write a lot of the material with the actors, not with Boosh but they’re not clowns, but as a member of the audience watching and writing along. Thinking ‘what do the audience want now? What shall I give them?’ Yes, you need that. It’s the other part of the process.

Because clown looks improvised. When an audience watch it, might the director’s role seem invisible?

It’s a question of. Certainly in terms of focus, when you doing a show you need someone to say to you, ‘look you’re doing something great there but it’s actually not as funny as what he’s doing’ (I wouldn’t say this in these words) ‘so the audience are going to be looking at him. So you do that later and let him do that.’ That’s just kind of re-organising. I find myself thinking, ‘I’ve had two different jobs’. As a writer, and as a director. And two things are separately working.

Are they working separately?

No, I was just thinking that. They’re separate skills but, yes, there’s a huge crossover.

Because I don’t think I could actually sit down and write but certainly working on The Bubonic Play I was writing lots of the material. It felt like writing as a director because you’re working off their relationships with each other and the audience, and that’s what inspires a lot of the ideas.

Yes, but also the subject matter. It’s funny, you are working off the actors but a lot of the stuff that goes into my shows, with Peepolykus and Spymonkey and Gladiatrix, are things from my life before I even knew them. So I am giving them stuff to play and helping them learn how to play it and that’s why it’s different, because I don’t always just work off the actors. There are some things that I just think, ‘this experience that happened to me or this thing that I saw or this thing in this serious boring film or this play I did at drama school, I’m going to put that onstage and make fun of it’ and I teach the clowns how to recreate that scene. So that’s half of what I do. The other writery bit is throwing something at the actors, something I know they can’t do, seeing them fail, pissing myself laughing at it because I think that’s terribly funny and then turning that into something that is usable and can work every night.

Was Barunka’s food taster in Gladiatrix to do with her shyness as a performer then?

It wasn’t really about Barunka at that point at all. For me, the funny bit about that was the scene that the other two were doing being interrupted and them having to wait for this terrible actress who always made the wrong decision to come on. My thing about Barunka’s characters was all the decisions that she made, because I had in my head this actress who’d said, ‘I haven’t got a very big part but, boy, do I make use of my time onstage!’ But every decision she made was a bad one. So she simply breaks the scene by taking too long to come on. It was more about making fools of them than making a fool of her. But then once I saw that she was coming, then I was able to add things.

When you devise. Do you have criteria in your head? Do you have a set of rules to keep to?

A lot of it’s to do with my attention span. And I don’t really like clever comedy. I mean some of it I do. When I was at Footlights I used to listen to all these old tapes of Stephen Fry and John Cleese and people, incredible. Clever. Funny. It was all the kind of stuff you would see on That was the week that was. Really biting satire about the legal system or politicians or whatever. I do think that’s funny but I prefer comedy that you don’t admire. I prefer when you’re not sitting there thinking, ‘he’s clever that one, what an education!’ I prefer this silly, childish, helpless laughter so if I think something’s too clever I normally try to take it out. I suppose that’s clown as well. But, in a way, I do have my own way of doing things which is going to be different from any other clown director and clown is a useful reference point because you can’t do the work that I like people doing unless you understand what clown is so clown is very useful as a kind of education base for the work. But I think my shows are more my rules than clown. I mean Gladiatrix isn’t really a clown show, and neither is Cooped really, but they’re both very much Cal shows, in a lot of what they contain.

But then isn’t there a structure which…. I mean, a structure I noticed that Stiff, Cooped and Gladiatrix all share is that there is someone to undermine, Lucy in Gladiatrix and Forbes in Spymonkey.

That’s classic. It’s Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers, it’s the guy with the cross eyes in Laurel and Hardy, whatever. You have to have someone to make the rules in order for them to be broken.

So you wouldn’t say that that’s a clown thing?

It is a clown thing. Those people I’ve just mentioned are all clowns. It probably spreads further. It’s just drama really. It’s conflict.

What about the influence of films on your work?

Huge.

It’s just anything, really. Anything that I’ve watched that makes a little imprint in my head and stays there, I will at some point do something with it. Most things. Whether it’s a film like The China Syndrome with Jane Fonda. A lot of lines in my shows. In Stiff there’s a line from Death in Venice, in Cooped there’s a line from The Seagull. A lot of things, I think, ‘Oh, I love that line.’ ‘There. Ready to face the world and fall in love all over again.’ It’s not said in a funny way in Death in Venice. It’s the last word spoken in the film before he dies, I think. But I thought, I love that line.

Is it funny in Stiff because the clown is undermining its seriousness saying it?

Yes, although the audience wouldn’t get that. It just has a nice ring to it; that line. Although, I do like undermining things. And, I’ve been wondering a lot recently about whether it’s – this sounds a bit deep now – but whether it’s to do with my sexuality. I’ve been wondering this a lot. When I was a child, I stayed innocent for such a long time about so many things because when I watched any kind of film which deals with normal heterosexual society, it just didn’t ever – I’m realising this only now – it just never, I never went, ‘Ah, yes, of course. Well, that’s what we’re like.’ I just felt on the outside of it a bit. Not miserably, because I wasn’t aware of being different from anybody else. But I do think that’s got a lot to do with it, is being on the outside of something. You don’t even know you’re on the outside but you are and you’re looking at things from a slightly strange angle all the time because they are films that are made to speak to you, and yet they don’t really speak to you. Whether it’s the handsome prince and snow white or whatever, it somehow doesn’t. Most people aren’t even aware of being affected by those things but they are because it’s the story of your life that you’re looking at up on the screen and if, somehow, you just go, ‘Well, actually, no. I don’t know why but it isn’t the story of my life.’

And I see everything, everything, in a funny way. That might sound tiresome and maybe it is. Somebody said to me at the end of eden. We had this party on the last night and a couple of actors arrived late and I was sitting in the middle of this room and everyone was laughing and she came in the door and said, ‘Oh God. I’m going to be so glad when you’re gone. I’m exhausted with all this laughing!’ And she wasn’t saying it as a complement. She just said, ‘It’s always laughing with you. Everywhere you go, always laughing.’ I’m not a great laugher but I feel very comfortable when everyone’s laughing. I just absolutely love that. And I’m not alone in that, lots of straight people feel very comfortable when everyone’s laughing but, for me, I think the way I see things is very affected by being slightly on the outside. And I think Edward Albee would say the same thing. It’s very strange and it’s only occurred to me recently that that’s why I notice odd things and I retain odd things. Does that make any sense at all?

It does. I’m thinking about those Impros you did with Spymonkey where they had to do a Dickens and they had to do a Wilde without really knowing them but just having a perception of the genre. Looking at it from the point of view of someone who is on the outside – like Aitor and Stephan doing ‘Englishness’. Genre crops up a lot and looking at genre. Chekhov in Horses for Courses, Gothic Romance in Cooped, Rome epics in Gladiatrix. Is genre a common starting point for making a show?

Not necessarily. It very much was with Cooped. To do something about a saint was Aitor’s idea. But my suggestion of how to do it was to do five different saints, each one a different genre. But I don’t deliberately think, ‘Oh, what genre shall I use?’ But I do maybe think in genres. There’s no genre in I am a Coffee or Stiff and it’s interesting that those are both the first full shows that I did with those companies. So perhaps, once I get to know a company I start seeing them in terms of genre. But I wouldn’t think of that first off.

Is there a danger in using genre that people will pigeonhole it into spoof?

Yes, because that did happen with Cooped. A lot of reviews said, ‘the hilarious spoof’ or whatever and I thought, ‘hilarious’ - very nice - but ‘spoof’ - Oh God.

Does it matter to be called spoof?

It does because spoof is easy. It’s easy to make a spoof. Spoof is Leslie Nielson films.

Mel Brooks?

Maybe he does spoofs. I suppose. But the thing is, although Cooped contains elements of spoof, it’s not just a spoof, because there are lots of things in Cooped that you wouldn’t find in a straight spoof of a genre. It’s slightly wilder than that. And also because it’s based in clown and clowns aren’t intelligent enough to do a spoof. On a good night Cooped doesn’t look like a spoof and on a bad night they go into that… because the audience love spoof, they love it. It’s something they recognise and so they go, ‘Oh, yeah. I know what they’re doing. This is great.’ And I don’t really want them to know that much because then they know why they’re laughing and I prefer it when the audience don’t know why they are laughing. Even if they do think they’re watching a spoof, you can surprise them – like when they come on naked. Spoof is too pat on the back, we’re all in this together, we’re all making fun of this together. I don’t want that. I want the world to be slightly more original than that.

So spoof is an element.

It is an element, of course. Because you’re laughing at humanity and humanity is also the products that they make to entertain themselves and so we laugh at that as well. Spoof is an easy label to stick on stuff.

Do you perceive a progression in your work?

I sometimes think maybe I should be thinking about doing my Hamlet. Directing Hamlet, because everybody has a Hamlet. There’s no reason why a comedy director couldn’t direct that. It would be a very moving, full production. But I think I’d be bored. I absolutely think I could do that show without a problem but I think I’d be very bored. Because I’d be looking for the laughs and the best scenes would be the ones where I got an opportunity to do that, like the players. I’d be bored. But comedians make the best tragedians but it doesn’t usually work the other way round.

It’s kind of the basis of Forbes, though, isn’t it? A tragedian stuck in a comedy?

Yep. This is a mistake that a lot of people make with Hamlet is that every thinks, ‘I’m doing Hamlet’ and even if they’re just playing second fiddler from the left they think, ‘it’s Hamlet’ and so you get al these Hamlets walking around. And, actually, everyone else is having quite a nice life; it’s only him having the problem. So there is a wonderful way to make a very light production. People have probably already done this I don’t know. But with this gloom going on in the middle. But it’s a long play and I think I’d be bored. And I would always be looking for the laughs. I mean, I did a part in Eastenders and I was looking for the laughs. It would have been very easy for me to just go in, do my bit and get out but, no! I was thinking I’m sure I can get a laugh if he slams the door in my face and I was saying, ‘look, close the door on me’ and they said, ‘No!’ But I was thinking, ‘God, let’s cheer everyone up, it’s Eastenders!’ So I do look for that.

But in terms of where things are going. Interestingly, I was at this forum at the National on Tuesday and they were talking about … The people they’d invited weren’t Cameron Mackintosh and people, they were ‘other people’ like me and Phelim McDermott and Toby Jones – we were the kind of physical theatre people and there were people from, dance, ballet, opera, other worlds as well. Phelim McDermott said, twice he made this point, that, although he is in fact doing a show at the National in 2004, he’s worried about it because he feels that just being in the building of the National will oppress him and he wont feel free to do what he feels free to do when they’re rehearsing something at the Battersea, when you haven’t got that pressure. And I thought, ‘God, how funny’. Because I would love to do a show at the National simply because it is the National and my natural iconoclasm would revel in presenting a show like Stiff in the Olivier. Probably not the Olivier, the Lyttleton would be more fun. But for people to come to the National and to think they were going to see something ‘worthy’ of the National and I would give them this stupid shit.

So you’d be walking around like the naughty rebel?

Not the rebel, that makes me sound too heroic. I’d be like the sneak.

This feeling of being an outsider. The mischievous one, thinking, ‘these idiots are letting me ruin their dignity.’

Yeh. I’d have a ball playing with the assumptions that the audience would have in coming to see a show at the National. I would love to have that energy to play with. Because it’s very clear what people have when they come to the National.

They’re interval drinkers, aren’t they. That’s what it seems to me when I go to the National.

I have less fun with those pretentious people than the really intellectual people who, you know, ‘love the work’. And that’s what annoyed me about this forum day. The discussions all day were so academic. ‘What is the nature of musical theatre and what are its boundaries’. I don’t want to talk about that! I wanted to have a creative discussion and it became an academic discussion and it really fucked me off. So what I did was I had a few drinks at lunch time and then started quietly heckling from the back when anyone I didn’t like spoke or said anything – to the amusement of quite a wide circle around me but not so that Nicholas Hytner could hear who was on the stage. I was going, ‘oh, fucking boring cunt. What’s he saying now?’ and people were really laughing. I just thought, ‘Oh god. This is driving me mad.’ So I’d love to have that … I just think, ‘Yes. Give me all those people with their suits and their educations and their academic discussions about what it all means afterwards. Give me that. I’d love to have fun with that.’ And those people go to see my shows all the time and talk for hours about what it all meant. I’ve read reviews lasting 4 pages from abroad. Where people have analysed and said, ‘McCrystal takes his influence from this and that’, and you just go, ‘Oh my God. It’s just a line from Death in Venice. It’s not my…’. It’s funny.

So that’s part of it and the other part of it is …

I don’t really feel like a director, I feel like an actor who is directing stuff. I feel like a bloke with a really good sense of humour who, as an actor, has the skill to bring out really good performances out of other people based on what I know. But I don’t feel like a director like Simon McBurney’s a director because he’s like a painter and he can paint the show in his head and then all he has to do is explain it. I’m not like that.

PAUSE

So I don’t have an artistic ambition necessarily. And I was saying this to the Canadians the other day. I’m not an artist, I’m an entertainer. Things that I do might turn out to be artistic but I don’t set out to make art. I just want to carry on having fun and develop my awareness of possibilities enough so that I can think more laterally about, think in every direction about – I mean working at Cirque du Soleil was incredible because it was a revelation that things could happen up and down as well as side to side. That might seem like a really simple thing to realise.

So they were quite acrobatic clowns, were they?

Well, no, I didn’t actually fly the clowns. I mean, we talked about it but all that stuff got cut because it was too expensive. It as going to cost £60,000 just for them to go in a wheelchair across a tightrope. So we cut that.

I’m thinking more about scale now. Because I’ve always made things for small scale which has been shown in large scale, particularly abroad. But also in London now, I’ve got these two shows I made for small scale. One in particular, Stiff, is the smallest scale show I’ve made in my life. No, not smaller than Gladiatrix but.

Does it work big?

It does. I’ve seen it in front of 1200 and it’s been like a rock concert, they loved it but that was in Mexico. And they’ve played 1200 seaters all over the place and bigger. But the Queen Elizabeth Hall, I’m worried that that’s going to be too big for them.

There’s something I pondered a lot after the eden project. The vulnerable quality that clowning has. Is that, for example, in the show I just did, I had an argument with my technical people about the size of the stage area. I was adamant that it shouldn’t be bigger than the audience. Because I felt that it wouldn’t get as big laughs if it didn’t feel like the audience was a greater presence than the stage. Do you lose that vulnerable element in a huge space?

Well. No, because my circus clowns in Cirque du Soleil work. They work really well.

Do they work in a different way?

No. Because the temptation is to play bigger when you’re in that big a space. It’s 2,500 seaters and it’s on 280degrees. And I said, ‘an honest moment. A genuine, honest, spontaneous moment will carry across dozens of rows of seats. So don’t play big.’ A friend of mine was on tour with the National, Peter Hall’s last production, and they went all over the world. They were doing The Tempest. And they were playing in these amphitheatres. And it was Stephen Mackintosh said to me when he came back. He said, ‘God. You know, playing those big theatres can really turn you into a bad actor.’ Because everything is so overgesticulatory and your timing changes, everything changes and you can lose any kind of essence. And it just becomes a big, mechanical acting by numbers thing. And I didn’t want the clowning to become that. I didn’t want them to play to the back row, in terms of size. So actually what they are doing is really subtle. And I keep an eye on them, they send me videos and stuff. I keep saying to them, ‘Do less. Every night you have to ask yourself, how can I do less than I did the night before. How can I get away with doing less than I did the night before.’ So it’s exactly the same.

But I did make it with that space in mind and Stiff I haven’t made with that space. And I’m talking more about sightline problems and things like the make-up. I would never have done the make-up scene at Cirque du Soleil because you can’t see the detail. And that make up scene is very funny but if you’re sitting more than 12 rows back you miss half of it.

Do you think that Clown is something that can teach other forms of theatre? What does it have to offer people who do the workshops but aren’t actually going to go and be clowns?

I used to say that I didn’t believe, you know how people say these stupid things, that I didn’t believe that anyone could be a really good actor (and by their own standards a really good actor) unless they had access to children. Because young children’s’ faces show everything without the studied quality that we all learn to have. When you’re interacting with children, everything shows in their face and they don’t pretend and they don’t cover up. They don’t know how to cover up their feelings. And they’re gauche and they’re clumsy and there’s such a beauty in that. And clown is, in a funny sort of way, just recapturing your child. It’s the child who wants to help but gets it wrong. And causes a disaster because they tried to do something right. And there’s many a child who’s cried because with the unfairness of being slapped or punished because they tried to help. Or the mischievous child or whatever it is. And I believe that because it is so simple… It’s the most simple, honest, vulnerable, sensitive part of yourself – clown – that’s what you are trying to show. And if you are an actor, if you’re not using those things as your basic tools, how good can you be? And clown is a very good way to access those. I know of no other technique – and I’ve done all of them that I know of, the method bits; I haven’t studied with Lee Strasburg but I’ve studied with people who studied with him and blah blah blah all that stuff – and I know of no other way that accesses that simple part of you so precisely, and that shows you a way to try and achieve it, as clown. A lot of other disciplines look at the text for the answers to the character. And this is the way we worked at drama school a lot. And you must be informed of what the writer thought of the character. But it won’t give you the performance, I don’t think. It wont give you the performance, knowing what the writer wanted the character to be; that’s all in the text, you can leave that. It’s what you bring to it. And you have to know yourself. As an actor, you really have to know yourself. And I play lots of games. Most of my games just seem like party games or the kind of game that you hear Barry Cryer doing on the radio. You know, those silly, psychiatric games that people play in acting companies. I love all those. They’re very exploratory. I play all those but they’re all designed to make people think about what they look like, what they sound like, what other people think of them. Because you cant go into something thinking, ‘I am an empty vessel, where is the part and I will become it!’ You can’t do that. That’s really dull. And a lot of actors work like that. Maybe I’ve seen some and I’ve thought they were great but I’d be surprised if I’d find that interesting because they tend to be efficient rather then human.

Is there an element of training then in your rehearsals?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Completely. I teach a lot. I teach in rehearsals all the time. Whether it’s just teaching people to do something that I have in mind and know how will work – so I’m simply technically teaching them or demonstrating something – or whether it’s teaching people to let go of all their bad habits; because everyone comes into rehearsals with bad habits. Sometimes all you have to do is make someone aware of some things and it will work out. You have to understand whether that’s going to happen or whether you actually need to focus on it.

And I love the idea of teaching. I love the idea of a performance coming out of a teaching situation. And that’s why I loved doing that student thing, that Titus Andronicus that I did with Paul King because I was there as their teacher and then Tom Morris asked me to do a production with them. And I used all the stuff I’d taught them and said, ‘We’ll put all this onstage and we’ll call it Titus Andronicus.’ And it worked so.

Proof ... in the pie.

Well, yes. The proof of the pie is in the eating. Yes, it’s true. So that did work. Yes. So. But I find teaching workshops exhausting. A workshop will knock me out for months afterwards because it’s just absolutely exhausting. Because you’ve got 25 people who’ve all paid a lot of money and they all want you to change their life. Everyone is there for their own benefit. That’s all. They’re just there for their own benefit. Naturally. To try and find something that every single person can go away and say, ‘Well. I was crap every day but this one day I got something brilliant.’ To make sure everyone has… everyone goes away feeling really good about the work.

PAUSE

Eeeer. Yes, I. The pleasure of being an actor compared to the pleasure of being a director. It’s very different. I feel that I’m a director for the benefit of other people and as an actor, I was an actor for the benefit of myself. And I’m not saying that by being a director I’m doing the world some good and I’m saving lives because of course it’s for my benefit because I’m the one getting a reputation and getting paid the big bucks and blah blah blah. Of course it’s for me and if it wasn’t doing me any good then I wouldn’t be doing it. But. There is something so absolutely deliciously selfish about being the kind of actor that I am. Where you’d go into a group and they’d say, “now, everyone, this is an ensemble piece” and I’d just go, “Yeah, right!”

PAUSE

Shall, I just quickly summarise? There is something deliciously selfish about being an actor. And going back to what I said about, the reason I wanted to be an actor is because one wants to be looked at and I don’t get that from directing. It’s more of a selfless thing. I tend to make up for the selflessness of being a director when I talk to a journalist I seem really big-headed but I want to say, “Look. This is my work, this is what I do.” Because I never really did that as an actor because it’s clear: somebody sees you onstage and they laugh, you hear the laughs, you know they’re your laughs and so you don’t really need to explain as much. But it’s a different. I’m glad I’m doing what I’m doing. One job I thought would have been absolutely marvellous would be to be in a sitcom. I thought, ‘Oh, I’d be funny in a sitcom.’ I thought, ‘wouldn’t that be great to get a sitcom that lasted for about five years and ha, ha, ha. Lots of money. Cover of TVTimes, that’d be lovely’. And kind of so what. I’m glad I didn’t do that. Because actually this is a much better thing to be doing. I’m working for Cirque du Soleil and it’s a much more rewarding thing, in the end, to look back on your life and say, ‘I wrote this and I directed this and I put on this.’

Do you plan to keep a foot in the fringe still?

I do, yes. I do. I might not have any choice. When I come back from Cirque, if these theatres that are talking to me at the moment, like The Royal Exchange, The West Yorkshire Playhouse and The National. If they give me shows and I get enough shows like that to keep me going, then that’d be nice. But I don’t know they’re gonna give me a show. Because I might just have fringe written all over me, despite what Cirque du Soleil say and do. On the other hand, I might not come back here. I might just stay in the States and do stuff over there. I don’t know what the future holds. But I’d hate to think that I couldn’t do those little shows with those new groups. I mean, David Sant, when he was talking to me about Your Face Here, was saying, “oh, I don’t know whether I should do it because: what about my reputation if it’s bad?” And I just thought you can’t … there are no guarantees. You might work on something with amazing people in it and it might be terrible. I said, “I worked with Lucy, Barunka and James simply because I liked them. I met them and they were up and bubbly and their eyes were shining and they had fun and I just thought, “yeah, okay.” The script wasn’t terrible, it had some funny things in it and I just thought, “yeah, I’m gonna have some fun with these people.” Whereas Paul King turned them down. They asked him first because they didn’t think that I’d be interested in doing some small thing with them. And Paul King said, ‘ooh, no!’. And now, of course, he’s pig sick that they’re not asking him to do the second one. But, David as well, I just said, “Don’t be so stupid. You haven’t actually got a reputation to lose as a director.”

Those little adventures are good. And it’s important in life to have fun with people as well and that means a lot to me. If I’m miserable working at the National, I won’t stay there and I wouldn’t have gone back to Cirque du Soleil if I hadn’t had such a fantastic time last time. With fun people. My dad used to call me ‘Good-time Charlie’ because I didn’t do any work at school and I just wanted to have fun all the time and I still do.

Let me just think if I’ve been clear about this acting thing … I will go back to acting because I owe it to myself. I do. I see it as a fertiliser if I go back on a stage and everybody’s looking at me. And the few things that I’ve done in the last few years I’ve sort of gone, ‘ooh, God!’ It’s just so brilliant when you go on and you get all that back and you hear all that laughter again and it’s just you and you can stand there and they’re laughing and you just go, ‘yes! I can do this.’ It’s really nice.

But to recap on this red nose thing. I was saying before, just in case you didn’t get this, that I don’t use red noses because I don’t really understand them. Because I never really felt funny in a red nose but I’ve used them in order to humiliate stubborn groups of people like the Footlights who think that they’re so clever that they can emulate a clown show without going through the whole process. So I did that to say, ‘No. We’re going this far down the line. Even a red nose.’ And they didn’t like working and there was a certain amount of spirit breaking that had to go on in order to…

Isn’t that the function of the red nose anyone, to a lesser degree with people who are willing to …

The function of the red nose is to make them look silly, yes, but wearing the red nose also gives you the freedom to say, ‘It’s the clown. It’s the clown doing this. Not Cal, who’s got these qualifications and lives at this address. It’s the clown.’ And I’ve never really known how that works so much. I made them wear red noses because I was stamping my foot and saying, ‘no, we’re going to go all the way.’ I don’t know whether the red noses did make them feel free because they hated the red noses every second that they were on their face, and the hated the elastic marks that they left on your cheeks and they just hated the whole thing but it made the point to them very clearly that they weren’t going to get away with being clever Cambridge people and faking it.

I thought one function the red nose serves was to make sure that, early on, you’re distinguishing between ‘comedy acting’ and clown because, at least in Mick’s workshop, people put on a red nose and started doing horrible ‘playing the red nose’ stuff and ‘acting stupid’.

Yeah.

So it was a way of making that happen on day one so that you could make the point early on. It tempts people into that mistake so you can correct it and move on.

Yes, I can see that working. It’s true, they do Bozo. I can see that working but for me, the red nose just never made me feel anything. It never made me feel any different in the come on and be funny exercise whether I had the red nose on or not. And if you have to come on and be funny then people are gonna do those clowny actions whether they’ve got the red nose on or not and that makes the point. For some people who think they put the red nose on and look at themselves in the mirror and think, ‘God, I’m funny already’ it might make the point for them but they’ll find out when the audience don’t laugh anyway. So I don’t really know what it adds, although it must be something that I’m missing out on because the teachers I respect all use them. I wonder is it tradition, though? I’m not sure. It gets on my nerves. I think I look less funny with a nose on. Something I do to my nose is I attach a little moustache to it underneath. I have a little moustache and that makes me look good. I look good with a moustache. But just having a red nose on its own doesn’t suit me.

Is that just personal taste or something to make you a little bit ridiculous?

The moustache makes me look a bit pompous, the type of moustache I put on. And that helps give my face a kind of look with the nose. Because the red nose doesn’t really change that much but the moustache gives something and both Pierre and Philippe have said, ‘oh yes, you’re one of these people who should have a moustache when they wear the nose’ so, when I did the clown show with Philippe, I grew this big moustache and had it in the show. Shaved the bastard off as soon as the show went down on the last night.

I feel like I’m a visitor to all this stuff as well. I really do feel, like I said, when I was a child I felt like I was visiting this other world all the time. I didn’t feel that with my family, I’m a very family person. Certainly at drama school I thought, ‘Oh God. Everyone’s an actor here.’ And I was saying I wanted to be an actor but I never really felt I was an actor, I felt I was a performer. Even though, if anyone had said that to me I would have said, ‘no.’ Even with this clowning stuff, I still feel that there’s this kind of world of clown people and I’ve come into the world and made successes of stuff which they haven’t managed to make successes of. But I don’t feel like I’m the centre of this clown world, I’m not in the club of the Phelim McDermott and Complicite. I’m completely outside. I’m not in any of those cliques, none of them. I’ve never worked with any of those people and, for all I know, they don’t even like me. I don’t care - maybe they do but I don’t care one way or another.

I’m not an expert in anything except for what I have and what I do.

You’re the only clown director around, really.

Yes. Jos Houben teaches.

Is he a director as well?

Yes, he’s mainly a director. I don’t think he directs as much now because he’s a teacher at Jacques Lecoq but he’s a very physical discipline. He teaches techniques. And Jos has directed some very good stuff in the early days of Complicite. But I’ve seen quite a few clown things he’s directed and they’ve been abysmal. Really shocking kind of not caring. And I don’t think he directs clown now. I think a lot of people grow out of it. I was talking to David about this. A lot of people start off as a clown company. They leave Gaulier school and they’re so in love with clown and they start a clown company and they grow out of it.

Complicite were initially clowning, weren’t they?

They were initially clowning, Told By An Idiot were initially a sort of clown company but people leave and they get in to storytelling. Peepolykus have for the most part stuck to their clowning roots and insisted that, ‘no, this is what we do.’ But now, they’ve broken that with the appalling Rhinoceros. I don’t know any other director who is exclusively clown-based, just making comedies. I don’t know anyone who just makes comedies in this way. Clown comedies, I’m the only one who just does that.

I said to Nick Hytner, “I see it as the highest art form.” I don’t see it as, ‘I’m just doing this…’ I think it’s the most difficult thing to do and it’s there’s nothing for me to grow out of. It’s not a stepping stone to something else. I’ve arrived where I want to be with this work. I’m not thinking about Hamlet because I’d just be bored.

Now, I don’t think I’ve been very profound!

I don’t need you to be profound.

Are you going to be profound instead? Because a dissertation needs to be very profound and I don’t think I’ve answered anything that profoundly I’ve just been kind of…

What’s the big issue with this?

I think the thread is about the director’s role in making the appearance of anarchy in a clown show is actually very precise and very …

I have to say that anarchy is the wrong word, because clowns should not be anarchists. I don’t like anarchic clowns. Because an anarchist is when you set out to destroy something and clowns try to help. Aitor says, “Would you like to see the horse?” because he wants to help; not because he is an anarchist. Petra goes into her movements like this or Aitor does the body scene because he thinks, ‘the audience are getting bored. I can’t just lie here still, it’s boring. They’ve paid all this money so I’ll slide off the table so I’ll give my friend the opportunity to save me and be a hero.’

Chaos.

Yeah, chaos. That’s a better word.

It’s funny because it’s just reminded me that before I’d really come across the word clown meaning this work. Before any of that had entered my frame of reference, I worked on a performance of Shakespeare scenes with an awful director. And I had a disagreement with him about Puck where I said it would be much funnier and much better if Puck was trying to help and getting it wrong. So he wasn’t an anarchist who set out to cause havoc but a clown who did he best and created chaos despite his good intentions and then, yes, maybe enjoyed the chaos.

Yes. Even if it is deliberately devious, it’s so funny to see the stupidity behind the deviousness. And it’s the stupidity behind whatever the idea is that makes it clown. But you’re right and that’s a very good way of playing Puck. Maybe you should play that part.

I think that’s all.

Is that really all, nothing more profound? I know I’m going to think afterwards, ‘I didn’t say anything profound’.

If you think of anything profound, e-mail me.

Okay, I’ll e-mail my profundity to you. I don’t think there are very profound things to say about clown but there are profound things to say about ideas, and what you do to an audience when they come in to a theatre.