Chapter
3
Not Your Typical
Clowns
In the warm-up games we have already discussed, the tendency towards competition is clear. The Eurovision game is the only one in which the clowns must work with each other as a team, elsewhere it is always a competition against each other. In Spymonkey’s work we can modify clowning to ‘competitive clowning’.
‘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.’[1]
In Cal’s work, ‘I’ve come
onstage and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do … so I’ll just do this’ is
often replaced by ‘I’ve come onstage and I know what I’m supposed to do
… but I’d rather do this’ – the impulse is still at the heart of the game.
Everyone ignoring their orders and doing what they want instead sounds like a
recipe for anarchy but Cal explains that ‘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.’[2]
So the clown knows what they should do but, for some reason, they genuinely
believe it is a good idea to do something else. Once again, believe it or not,
Cal has an improvisation game that perfectly illustrates this very notion. The
rules are laid out like this:
‘You have to audition for me
as an actor. You’re auditioning for the part of a policeman who has to deliver
some really bad news to a member of a family, all the family have been killed
somehow. But you know that I’m directing a film later in the year that you
would love to be in as well. So you have to suggest to me that you’d be right
for that as well.’[3]
The film, or other project, is different for each new player of the game, decided upon each time from a practically unlimited number of possibilities. Here is a clip of Michael from ‘One Yellow Rabbit’ auditioning for the part of the policeman whilst ‘suggesting’ himself for a film about a magician.
PLAY CLIP 5
Like the master/servant
game, the participant has objectives as an actor – to impress the panel, to get
the job, to get both jobs - and the character is a by-product of this
aim. In most acting work, for the actor to focus on their own abilities or
failings as an actor, rather than the character’s needs and aims, will block
them and lead to self-conscious untruthful performance. Declan Donnellan
describes how fear makes an actor asks these questions:
‘Will you, the actor, be
loved? Will you, the actor, seem talented? Will you, the actor, look good? Will
you, the actor, be wanted? Will you, the actor, be dropped? Will you, the
actor, be ignored? Will you, the actor, look stupid? Will you, the actor, be
humiliated?’[4]
The audition game makes the
actor ask the same questions but uses them as a source of comedy, not tragedy.
It encourages the participant towards ‘demonstrating’ and generalised bad
acting and we laugh at the actor’s ego and anxiety. Michael finds a way to
deliver the news, that Aitor’s children have disappeared, which will also show
off his skills as a magician. He thinks he’s being very clever, because he
finds logical justification for the ‘magic’ but the result is that his
policeman character is extremely insensitive. The game undermines the
seriousness of the scene. Here, content of the scene is becoming
important because it has to be something that the game can successfully
undermine – the news of a family’s death is a deliberately serious and emotive
subject. Thus, Spymonkey’s shows begin take another turn away from ‘pure
clowning’ in the seeming presence of a script.
‘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.’[5]
PLAY CLIP 6
Petra Massey and Toby Park performing a scene
from Spymonkey’s Stiff
Again, the content of the scene has great gravity; Forbes has come to discuss the funeral arrangements for his late wife. Perhaps this is why Petra’s clown, Amanda Bandy, has decided she can improve the show by playing a love scene – she thinks, ‘the audience don’t want to be depressed by a scene about funeral arrangements, they want a classic love story!’ or perhaps she is simply out to impress any agents in the audience, using each scene to show off another side of her versatile acting range. The scene is again taking us close to a comedy of acting, playing on the common actor’s fear of selfish acting partners.
‘Did I really want to work in performances in which your acting partner might not be supporting you, but actually playing to make you look bad, because he wanted to make himself look good for a fancy agent sitting in the audience that night? His “super-objective” was in the audience.’[6]
Forbes’ tries to cut in at first but soon loses his patience (which simply fuels the divorce section of Mandy Bandy’s little performance) and eventually resigns to her whim, taking the ring she thrusts at him and leaving. The whole scene had been a spontaneous choice for Mandy Bandy, and a complete surprise to Forbes. Here we have the multi-layered dynamic of a Spymonkey show – The actors are playing clowns who are playing characters.
This
can initially seem a complex setting. Traditionally, we witness a clown as one
of the characters: that is to say we watch a play or film and we say that one
of the characters is a clown. For example, there are many people roaming around
in Animal Crackers[7],
but three of them are clowns (the Marx Brothers). Therefore, the clowns exist
within the world of the script. In Spymonkey’s shows the opposite is true: the
script exists within the world of the clowns. It is the actor, not the
character, who is the clown, and the task they have to fail at is not within
the script (like the Marx brothers attempting to steal a painting) but is
the script itself. In short, Spymonkey are clowns faced with the task of
putting on a play.
The plays are both written by Forbes Murdston and we gather that both have a traditional, realist or well-made, melodramatic form. In staging them, however, he has mistakenly hired Amanda Bandy, Udo Keller and Alfredo Graves. These three clowns are not going to help maintain any sort of illusion to realism.