Scaramouche Jones

102793 original

Midnight on the last day of the year nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, and Scaramouche Jones is waiting to die. Breaking a fifty-year silence, his swansong is an account of his life, which spans the entirety of the previous century. Perhaps the beauty of this play for a largely British audience lies in its insistence on the enduring quality of the British Empire and the comforting awareness of a certain stability that goes along with it.

In a maelstrom of misfortune and suffering, the most important thing to the young Scaramouche is that his father is an Englishman. Here performed by the playwright himself, Scaramouche Jones is a perfect boys’ own vagabond story of rags-to-riches, or at least rags-to-a greater understanding of the world. As Scaramouche is battered, blown and knocked about at the hands of fate between The West Indies, Africa and Europe his experiences and ordeals crystallise into the form of white masks, marking him forever.

Butcher’s performance is well-measured and physically entertaining, evoking far-off bazaars and each colourful character with skill. The clown-figure has always been, as Scaramouche notes, a tragic as well as a comic performer, hovering between worlds, at once observing and at the centre of the action. As Scaramouche is cast away from home, beaten by gypsies and sold into slavery, so he witnesses the great events of the world as the terrible twentieth century unfolds. This play has not lost its huge variety of charms, and its Edinburgh début is long overdue.