Fears of a clown

By MICHELE HEWITSON

"What's wrong with a bit of fear and delight?" asks the 100-year-old clown, Scaramouche Jones, in Justin Butcher's play of the same name.

Pete Postlethwaite plays Scaramouche. And that helps.

Because on paper, the piece - performed as a BBC radio play in 2001, on stage in the same year at the Dublin Theatre Festival, and which has been on the road pretty much ever since - is an unlikely sounding work for theatre.

There is just one character on stage for 90 minutes, telling the strange story of the life of a clown; a life which spans exactly the 20th century.

And then consider the fact that the character has not spoken for the past 50 years.

When he does decide to speak, his story takes in his birth in Trinidad in a shop which sells fish by day, sex by night. His mother is a gypsy whore; his father, to the pride of the strange little boy with a curiously pale face, an Englishman.

His mother dies, on the fishmonger's slab. Scaramouche is sold to a blackbird slaver, sold on to a snake charmer in Senegal whose snake is called Benjamin Disraeli.

He witnesses the coronation of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, goes to a ball with Mussolini, becomes a grave digger in a concentration camp and, at the age of 51, reaches England - at which point he becomes a clown, crayons on his downturned clown's face, and does not speak again.

But it is the language of the play which makes this look, on paper, an unwieldy vehicle.

Here is Scaramouche telling the story of his birth: "It was midnight, on the cusp between the two centuries, the hour of my popping out, my shelling, and the scene of my birth was a fishmonger's shop on a dingy wharfside in Port o' Spain, Trinidad.

"As I squirmed between my mother's legs, slippery with amniotic ooze, and slithered on to the slab begrimed with fish scales and rank with the stench of gutted crabs, naval guns boomed out across the harbour, heralding the onset of a brand new century, and pounding out a fierce warlike salute to the health and happiness of Queen Victoria far away."

Two questions occurred to Postlethwaite when he was approached to play the clown: "Was it possible to learn it? And was it dramatically viable?"

"It's all right to read it in a script and think 'Well, it's a fantastic tale,' but does it contain the dynamics that theatre needs?"

In Postlethwaite's endearingly enduring clown, it does. According to the British Sunday Times it is "the performance of his life".

Said the Guardian: "The cliche 'the tears of a clown' becomes new-minted in Postlethwaite's performance; he finds in Scaramouche the tragic and the ludicrous, an Everyman on a bumpy odyssey through the century."

In Melbourne he delivered a quietly triumphant performance which audiences responded to with standing ovations.

Postlethwaite, that most modest of great actors (In the Name of the Father, Brassed Off, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet), puts that response down to the character.

He says people stand in their seats to applaud not him but his character's plea for compassion "in the face of the world".

When Scaramouche asks: "What's wrong with a bit of fear and delight?" he is talking about the role of the clown. And the role of theatre.

Justin Butcher's clown as played by Postlethwaite - he would say inhabited by - is an extraordinary theatrical creation.

What rendered him mute was witnessing the horrors of the concentration camp. This is where he became a clown.

"My role in the 'Final Solution' was to dig mass graves ... Sometimes, presumably for the sake of variation, huge droves of living victims were herded to the edges of pits and then machine-gunned into the ground.

"However the corpses arrived, whether by gas, bullet or malnutrition, my task was then to shovel white lime all over their contorted limbs and twisted faces - like the painting of so many clowns."

Here, at the edge of these awful pits, Scaramouche discovers an astounding thing: he can make children laugh.

"I would wink at them, pull faces, laugh hugely without a sound, cavorting and making fun of the guards behind their backs, acting out a silent pantomime of the execution that was about to take place."

And so, he says, "the common euphemism for extermination in our camp became not going to the showers, or going for a haircut, but 'going to see the clown'."

The first record of the clown in history was set down around 2270BC. "A noble spirit - to rejoice and delight the heart," was how that clown was described by a boy Pharaoh.

But the clown has also long been the conscience of society. The court jester's job was to satirise silly behaviour by those who should know better; and to remind those in authority of their obligations.

Butcher's creation is the clown as Everyman. Going to see the clown here means to confront the fear and delight that co-exist within all of us.

Performance

* Who: Pete Postlethwaite

* What: Scaramouche Jones

* Where and when: Sky City Theatre from next Wednesday