How's this for devotion to your art? Actor/comedian Thom Tuck (Penny Dreadfuls, Horrible Histories, Play What I Wrote) first performed Scaramouche Jones at the Fringe 20 years ago. Then he did it again 10 years ago. After this run he plans to keep doing it every decade until he is 100 – the same age veteran clown Jones is at the start of Justin Butcher's poignant and funny play when we see him alone backstage celebrating his birthday on New Year's Eve 1999.
This remarkable work tells his life in flashback. It starts with him after another clowning performance. Red-nosed and white-faced he starts to think about his long life. Scaramouche has seen everything (though he doesn't mention if he ever did the fandango). Born in Africa, handed around like pass the parcel as a baby, travelled through continents, life has certainly never been dull. He's a Zelig figure, overlapping with the likes of Mussolini and former Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie.
Eventually he finds himself in Krakow in the 1930s. You don't have to be AJP Taylor to know what is just a few years away. Butcher's taut script and Tuck's utterly immersive performance (I've met him in the pub and at gigs over the years and I forgot it was him) playing not just Jones but all the characters he meets along the way will have you transfixed.
Sure enough the concentration camps loom. As if the tone wasn't dark already it gets even darker as Jones finds himself working with a shovel, burying the dead when not making doomed children laugh (echoes of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful and Jerry Lewis's never released The Day The Clown Cried). As the lime covers the corpses' faces they too turn into macabre white-faced jesters.
It's hard to know where to go from there and Butcher realises it. I'd expected the story to bring us up to 1999 but it ends shortly after WW2 when Jones has to account for his actions in court. Tuck is mesmerising throughout, slapstick laughs and phsyical humour adding lightness between the bleakest of events. What are we supposed to conclude? That in the face of pure horror what can one do but be a clown? That's for the audience to decide.
You've got a few more days to catch Scaramouche Jones. If not put it in your diary for 2035.
Until August 25 at 14.45. Info here.
*****
