Cal McCrystal: Great gags (and a story if you insist)

Director Cal McCrystal is only happy when his audiences are in stitches. Brian Logan meets theatre's Mr Funny

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Battersea Arts Centre

'One day you're thinking, 'God, I'm really not very good'," says director Cal McCrystal (son of the journalist of the same name), "and the next day you think you're great." Today falls into the latter category. McCrystal is a one-man laugh factory, the brains behind some of the funniest theatre in Britain these past five years. And he's not in the mood to be modest about it. He's just returned from Canada, where he's spent three months directing the clown sequences in Cirque du Soleil's latest moneyed spectacular. "And my clowns," he says, "are really bringing the house down." Asked how he intends to follow such a triumph, McCrystal replies, "I'd like to do something at the National Theatre. I think it's their job to give me a job."

Happily, his swagger is justified. At 42, McCrystal is at the vanguard of one of the fastest-rising theatre movements in the land. He honed his skills under the Camden-based clown guru Philippe Gaulier, and pursued a successful performing career in theatre, film and, lucratively, TV ads.

Then his friends, the comic theatre three-piece Peepolykus, called, asking him to direct their show Let the Donkey Go. The resulting slapstick classic was one of the fringe hits of the mid-Nineties, and suddenly McCrystal was hot comic property. Successive Edinburgh hits with stand-up stars like the Boosh and Mel and Sue alternated with eye-catching, hilarious fringe theatre work, until McCrystal synthesised the two strands in Spymonkey, the hugely successful clown company that arrives in London this week with its latest show, Cooped.

McCrystal's rise has coincided with the coming of age of the devised comedy genre. The West End smash The Play What I Wrote brought to the wider public's eye the loopy comic skills of fringe veterans The Right Size. Last year's Perrier Award was swiped by Garth Marenghi's Netherhead, a theatrical spoof directed by McCrystal protégé Paul King. Now Spymonkey – who, says the director, "express my work better than any company I've worked with" – is among a handful of companies whom the British Council regularly export to all corners of the globe. "This is-it-stand-up?, is-it-theatre? stuff is what people want," McCrystal insists. "Our shows are story, they're sitcom, they're stand-up – they're everything in one. My objective is to get the audience to laugh, and I will do that any way I can."

He prizes gags above stories. "I find story a bit boring. I try to oblige the audience with a story, but it's not something I'm interested in." It's all about laughs. "I like to get a roll of laughter starting at the beginning and going on until the end. And if that doesn't happen I'm not happy." It often does, not only because he won't let a ropey fart gag lie, but because he knows how to coax beautiful comic performances from actors. "I'm very good at finding what people's clown is, and really helping them to present it."

What does he mean by the word clown? "Everyone is a clown," he explains. "Your clown is the thing about you that your friends make fun of behind your back. It's that thing that makes you a fool, and we're all fools." It's that ridiculous vulnerability that McCrystal presents, anarchically, on stage. "I like to see the actor on stage. Not the character, just the actor. If someone's got an ego problem or whatever, I want to see that rather than the fact that they can juggle. I'm much more interested in what people are not good at than what they are good at."

So can Cal McCrystal break through the fringe's glass ceiling and follow comic theatre predecessors Complicite into the mainstream? He hopes so. "I can't see why blue-rinses wouldn't laugh at Cooped", he says. "We get good crowds in the provinces and all the oldies love it just as much. I'd like to get the coach trips in as well."

At the moment, he's co-writing a sitcom, flitting between Canada and London, and preparing "a big spectacular show based on the Mexican Day of the Dead" to be staged at Cornwall's Eden Project in the autumn. Oh, and he's working on adapting Spymonkey's talents to the TV – although Peepolykus and the Right Size have both tried and, so far, failed to make the leap to the small screen. "But I wasn't directing them," he purrs. "I think I know how to do it. I've worked in TV a lot. There's nobody else with this combination of experience." This is fighting talk. "Of course. But I'm ambitious. I certainly wouldn't have given up my very well paid career as an actor if I didn't think my directing career was going to go places."

'Cooped': BAC, London SW11 (020 7223 2223), Tue to 9 June