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written by Justin Butcher, directed by Rupert Goold

Mirvish Productions, Winter Garden Theatre, Toronto

October 16-December 7, 2003

As you enter the Winter Garden Theatre, you see the interior of a grungy circus tent and hear faraway music and applause.  Soon Pete Postlethwaite enters in a battered clown outfit.  Without the red nose and Bozo shoes he could be one of Beckett's tramps.  But he is Scaramouche Jones on December 31, 1999, the last night, precisely, of his 100 years of life, ready to tell us, the assembled ghosts of past, present and future, his life story to disburden himself of the past as he leaves life behind.

On one level, his story is the fantastic tale of a white boy born to a dark-hued Trinidadian prostitute, who, after suffering all manner of abuse, finally reaches the England of his dreams.  The seven white masks he acquires on his bizarre journey reveal the play as a harsh re-imagining of the Seven Ages of Man.  It is also an unsentimental farewell to the brutality of the 20th century, a portrait of the collapse of empire and a critique of the supposed superiority of whiteness, which symbolizes everything from innocence to the corrosive lime Scaramouche shovels over the mass graves of Holocaust victims.    

British author Jusitin Butcher's text is much more a narrative than a play and its prose often strives too hard for poetry.  But Postlethwaite, best known as Kobayashi in The Usual Suspects, is a master story-teller, a graceful mime and an actor of great subtlety.  He plays a dozen other characters drawing attention not to his virtuosity but to the tale he tells.

Though leavened with humour, the play is a dispassionate survey of humankind's folly.  Identifying himself with the last century, Scaramouche says, "It took 50 years to make the clown, 50 years to play the clown."  Scaramouche may vanish but the 21st century has already begun as the clown.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-10-30.

Photo: Pete Postlethwaite as Scaramouche Jones. ©2003 Allen Daniels.