Presented by Guy Masterson’s Centre for International Theatre
@ Higher Ground – Main Theatre
THURSDAY 1st March (until March 4)

Let me be clear; Scaramouche Jones is nothing short of incredible. Written and performed by the phenomenal Justin Butcher, and directed with understated brilliance by Guy Masterson, it is theatre that will convert the unwilling, satisfy the jaded and replenish the true believers. Housed within Masterson’s Centre for International Theatre at Higher Ground in the West End, the play returns until March 4 after an enormously successful 2010 Adelaide Fringe season.

It begins with the muffled sound of applause, and a silhouette of an unspoken performance cast on the white sheets that frame the sparsely adorned stage. Though we are not to know it yet, we have seen, quite literally, the ending of the play foreshadowed by these swift, evocative movements. We have seen both the life and final moments of the clown of the Twentieth Century, Scaramouche Jones. He enters through a dark opening in the middle of the draped sheets and collapses into a chair, exhausted. As he soon tells us, we are about to witness his final performance.

It is December 31, 1999, the eve of Scaramouche Jones’ one-hundredth birthday, the eve of the millennium. Over ninety enthralling minutes we are lead through a series of fantastic episodes that make up the clown’s life and intersect with major moments of the Twentieth Century. It is no accident that the clown shares the dates of the century just past; he is, in a way, the very essence of the most tumultuous time in history. His story is hilarious, violent, and ultimately, extremely moving. As Butcher told me, Scaramouche’s journey acts as “a cockeyed squint at the Twentieth Century”. Like an era that spawned both penicillin and the atom bomb, it is both hopeful and hopeless, tragic and comic, the distillation of the very essence of the clown.

Born on a fishmonger’s slab to a Trinidadian whore — “a clown’s nativity” — and marked with peculiarly white skin, Scaramouche is destined for a life of complication. Forced to watch a string of men lose themselves between his mother’s legs, he becomes obsessed with discovering his father’s identity. Once, and only once, his mother lets slip that his father “was an Englishman”. And so begins his search for England. After a client kills his mother, he is sold into slavery by a missionary, and through a circuitous and unexpected route, finds himself working for a kind but bewildering Somali snake charmer. Through a series of absurdly believable events, each hinging on his enchanting white skin, Scaramouche becomes the object of desire for a homosexual Italian nobleman, is cared for then beaten by a group of gypsies, employed in a Polish monastery before finding himself in a German extermination camp in World War II. Forced into work as a gravedigger, while waiting to spread lime over the recently destroyed, he discovers he has the ability to momentarily distract the children from their impending doom. He mimes a comic execution, making the children smile before they are wiped out forever. In this combination of laughter and sadness Scaramouche realises his calling — to be a clown.

After being cleared of war crimes, he finds his way, finally, to England. It is here that he discovers an affinity with, of all people, a Trinidadian man, and in recounting his story to peals of laughter, assumes his final mask. For the next fifty years he is silent, entertaining audiences night after night with the mimed repetition of his life, fulfilling the role of his commedia dell’arte namesake.

Being someone whose natural inclination at a theatre performance is ‘the armadillo response” — curling into a ball and waiting till it’s over — I found myself, for the first time, completely enthralled by a play, and by Butcher’s flawless portrayal of the clown. As I tried to write notes, scribbling furiously in the dark, I found my pen trailing off. When I looked back over what I had written, all I found were half-formed sentences, my hand having been stilled by Butcher’s performance.

Even if the play were not so consummately acted, it would be worth seeing for the writing, its thematic depth, and its sheer originality. There is enough in this play to keep the more academically minded staring at their desks, deep in thought, for days on end. There is a wealth of material beyond the play’s analysis of the events of the Twentieth Century. Between the ornate grandiloquence of the clown’s speech, “the eloquent flood of language that vomits forth” (as Butcher puts it) and the silence of mime, lays plains in which to explore the efficacy of expression. The complicated position of ‘whiteness’ in the play could probably sustain a PhD.

But it is not only interesting on an abstract level. There is, undoubtedly, a political element to the play. As Butcher — an Englishman — told me, Scaramouche Jones, “was written in response to millennium fever” in England. Precipitated by the controversial construction of the Millennium Dome in London, Butcher’s script investigates the limits of the British national psyche; as Butcher explains, “I wanted to add my ten penneth to the mix.” It is in this light that the clown’s post-WWII silence can be understood. “The English identity is fixed in WWII,” Butcher argues. “That was the last gasp of English greatness.” For a country such as ours, whose sense of national worth is based almost entirely on the ANZAC legend, perhaps this element of the play is particularly poignant.

Wait. I’ve started rambling. I could go on. But I can’t go on. Time to wrap this up.

Let me be clear, again; go and see Scaramouche Jones. If there was one downside, it was that there were spare seats in the house. Theatre of this level is rare. With the play already cemented in its position as a modern classic, you would be a fool — a clown — for failing to go and see it.