Scaramouche Jones at Sky City Theatre

By PETER CALDER

Pete Postlethwaite's one-man show arrives on a tide of goodwill generated by the knobbly-faced thesp who is, by all accounts, a hell of a nice bloke when he has a pint in one hand and a fag in the other.

But little more than the residual memory of his fine screen performances sustains this piece, which spins the picaresque life story of a centenarian clown into a retrospective of the century past and a meditation on the nature of being human. Indeed, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the touring show is a calculated exercise in can't-miss marketing (certainly the programme, dense with advertising, but selling in the foyer for an extortionate $15, does nothing to dispel that impression).

As a piece of theatre it struggles to impress and much of the blame resides with the extraordinarily showy script. The writer, Justin Butcher, who once wrote and performed "an aetiological fable about the origins of satire", gives his actor endless, rambling sentences full of self-conscious, look-no-hands effects. Most of those that hang together (death is described - twice - as having a "ravening nuptial embrace") are pretentious piffle, but the evening is littered with cliche ("all four corners of the globe"), imprecision (a tugboat is described as "lapping" in the harbour swell) and tautology ("accumulated accretions" or making "utter humiliation complete").

Even at the moments when his undergraduate excitement works (a prostitute's customers are described as having "busy buttocks") the language is dense and studied, more suitable for the pages of a novel than the mouth of a reminiscing, unschooled clown. Most unforgivably, Butcher hijacks the Holocaust to create a tableau of quite nauseating sentimentality.

Postlethwaite's performance is not commensurately problematic though it has to be said he seldom makes more than a fair fist of it. Labouring under the load of the words, he struggles to maintain pace and the show feels much longer than its 90 minutes.

He's also no Marcel Marceau though, mercifully, relies less on his physical agility than his voice, like syrup poured through a barrel of bolts, to carry the night. But he's handicapped by the improbability of his high-flown language which holds us at arm's length rather than drawing us in. And in the quieter passages, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the people up the back who, I am told, could either breathe or hear, but could not do both at once.

A stage appearance by screen stars once occasioned awe tinged with gratitude that they had come all this way at all. It's a smaller world now, and a smarter one. Audiences here may not be happy to shell out $75 for second-rate stuff, when the town is busy with first-rate local fare.