Circus music strikes up, a silhouette of a clown acting out a sequence of seemingly unfunny moves plays out, a Nazi salute, mock-gunfire, death, an angel’s wings unfurls. For some reason laughter and applause rings out on the speakers. I assume this is a renowned part of the act and that we will get some explanation later. We do, though I wonder now if it would elicit such roars from a late 20th-century audience. It is Millenium Eve; Scaramouche Jones has been alive for one hundred years, and what a life he has lived.
Nigel Francis acts and directs this piece of theatre that is low-key and ambitious, tragic and comic, perhaps forty years too long yet too short to convey its protagonist’s depths. It is difficult to describe. Francis does a fine job. He is masterful in his delivery of the beauty of the script, evoking city scapes and distinct characters in one breath, but he struggles to show that he is telling his own story. His Scaramouche may well be repeating something he has heard about an ancestor. There is little sense of definition in this characterisation.
I could not help but wonder if the transition from stage to page might harm or help a piece such as this. A memoir is always a fictionalized version of events, in its very nature it must condense something so vast (life on this earth) into the written word.
To want to be remembered is perhaps egocentrical and undeniably human. A novel would allow Scaramouche the space to embrace both, and ironically, to have him removed from the stage would give him a greater tangibility. He needs prosaic flesh. The problem lies in that we hear too much of what Scaramouche does, what happens to and around him, what people say and how they act, but very little of his inner dialogues and decisions. In his whole life, he seems never to put a foot wrong. He is passive, yet altogether (dare I say) angelic.
Writer Justin Butcher locates Scaramouche on a decidedly global scale. Though little of the cosmopolite shines in Francis’ performance, the story in itself is fascinating. The language is summoning, and demanding, in its intrinsic visuality. What Scaramouche says, we have to imagine. That is writer Butcher’s greatest strength.
I would recommend that people do go and see the show, but not if they are not prepared to engage with the play’s premise. This is theatre that needs full attention,each word needs to be heard. I would also advise Butcher to start drafting the first pages of his novel, asap. ★★★★☆ Will Amott 14/02/15
