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Scaramouche Jones, at the Oxford Playhouse until Saturday 4th May "Fifty years to make the clown. Fifty years to play the clown." Scaramouche Jones is the swansong of a clown who has chosen to die on the eve of his hundredth birthday. Having played the mime for fifty years, he chooses to break silence and share his life story with us, the audience. In a beguiling, beautiful, heartbreaking hour-and-a-half, we experience the life and death of theatre's tragicomic Everyman. Pete Postlethwaite's portrayal of the clown Scaramouche is masterful. He has the tired, windblown feel of someone too-long exposed to the world, yet tells his story with humility, wisdom and whimsy. Scaramouche is Postlethwaite's clown, not the clown of the writer or director. He plays the myriad cast of his life story with ease and affection. He responds to and engages the audience and is infinitely comfortable in the role of performer. His story begins with his birth in a Trinidadian port, the pale-faced child of a Gypsy prostitute who traded from a fishmongers slab ("she was a bottomless receptacle for the sloshing semen of many nations"). Justin Butcher's prose is poetic and evocative. Through it Scaramouche transforms the backstage-circus-paraphanalia of the set into a cornucopia of locations. Entire worlds, rich in colour, noise and smell are crafted for the audience from his imagination. Magical, shifting lights and sound create a space that grows and shrinks with the ebb and flow of the story. Scaramouche takes us over the seas to Africa and a snakecharmer with a penchant for Gilbert and Sullivan; to sea with a Rear-Admiral of the Italian Navy; to a Krakow jail and the concentration camps of Split, and finally to the eaves of Westminster Bridge. It is here at the end of his journey that he reflects on his life. Each episode has ingrained on him its own white mask - masks of emotion or environment; layers of the world he carries with him. Like his Romany predecessors, he has become legion, the product of many times and many places. He has become ridiculous. In a moment of revelation, he buys a pot of face-paint and makes all of these white masks manifest. He becomes his final incarnation: Scaramouche Jones, the clown. This story of creation is undercut by the gradual stripping away of the trappings of Scaramouche's clown. In the transient surroundings of the circus tent, with its trestle table and riggings of ladders and acrobatic hoops, it is only the clown's possessions that have any permanence. As he tells his tale he loses his red nose, his tonsured wig, his tailcoat, and eventually his trousers and oversized shoes. The play ends, and he closes the book on the final chapter of his life. Scaramouche Jones is a wonderful piece of theatre. The assuredness and craftsmanship with which Postlethwaite captivates the audience is astonishing (and he took his standing ovation with self-deprecating grace). "Pity me, but do not mock me," he implores. A beautiful story, stunningly told. Harry Smith |