Guy Masterson – Theatre Tours International
in association with Passion Pit Theatre & J Productions Milan presents
25th Anniversary Edition
Written & performed by Justin Butcher
Directed by Guy Masterson
(with original Direction by Rupert Goold)
Sound Design: Adam Cork
Video Design: Damian Hale
Lighting: Tom Turner
Assembly Rooms: Bijou Tent
Aug 6 - 30 2026 (not 12th)
16:10 (90 mins)
Centenarian clown Scaramouche's odyssey through crumbling empires, comic misadventures, the 20th century's darkest episodes, the loves, brutalities, ecstasies and tragedies beneath his seven white masks.
A poetic, profoundly moving voyage unfolds, an enchanting virtuoso performance with haunting, evocative designs conjuring a world of indelible images, a glorious tale sumptuously told.
Writer-performer, Justin Butcher, is directed by Olivier winner, Guy Masterson (The Shark Is Broken) 25th Anniversary Edition.
‘A masterpiece of solo magic realism' (BritishTheatreGuide).
Offie winner Best Actor Award, 2022.
'Mesmerising' (Guardian).
'Fascinating, poignant, funny... Storytelling at its best' (The Times).
‘Unique, stunning... a new kind of theatre' (Metro)
WINNER: OFFIE AWARD - BEST SOLO PERFORMER 2022
SCARAMOUCHE JONES @ WILTONS 2021
 INDEPENDENT CATHOLIC MEDIA 25/06/21
I am hard-pressed to imagine a more joyful return to the theatre after the doldrums of Covid confinement than a trip to Wilton’s Music Hall to see Justin Butcher perform in his celebrated tour de force Scaramouche Jones.
A historic venue for an historic occasion: this is the twentieth-anniversary production of the play, penned on the eve of the Millennium and which originally starred the late, great Pete Postlethwaite in its first fully fledged outing.
The one-man play is a form of meditation on the state of the world at the end of the Twentieth Century – and yet all its central preoccupations remain all too relevant today.
The hundred year-old clown Scaramouche Jones has just given his final performance on Millennium Eve and proceeds to recount his story (and history) to the assembled audience.
And what a picaresque story it is. Our hero is born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, during carnival on the cusp of the Twentieth Century, the son of a dark-skinned gypsy prostitute and, apparently, an Englishman – for Scaramouche is remarkably white. To deliver just a few headlines: his mother is murdered and he is sold into slavery. After some sea-faring, he accompanies his master, an anglophile snake-charmer, to Haile Selassie’s coronation in Addis Ababa. Disaster strikes when their prize cobra disrupts the ceremony but Scaramouche is freed from prison by a lecherous Italian dignitary from whom he escapes by diving into the icy waters in Venice harbour. Here he is revived by fellow gypsies and ends up rescuing one of their young daughters from incarceration. Brutally beaten, he finds refugee in a Polish monastery and is joined by several others who are seeking a safe haven from Nazi atrocities. As war erupts, he flees once more, is captured, and forced to become the grave-digger in a concentration camp in Croatia. Here, he manages by silent clowning to diminish the suffering of child victims in the camp. This leads to his exoneration and the offer of a British passport and an ironic homecoming: ‘For he is the son of an Englishman.’
Scaramouche Jones resonates with many sources, not least parodic echoes of imperialist derring-do as recounted by John Buchan, Conan Doyle, Haggard and Kipling. The play’s examination of empire, race and identity remains all too topical given the baleful culture wars being weaponised by the right.
Arrestingly, a crucifix stands over all, centre stage, and overarching all, it is possible to glean a fascinating Christian ethos sustaining the drama and Butcher’s vision.
On several occasions, the protagonist Scaramouche declares his name is ‘legion’ (like the Gadarene demoniac). He represents the innumerable ‘wretched of the earth’, the voiceless, against whom terrible deeds are done. Ironically, in the face of all the world’s suffering in the twentieth century and all the seeming inanity, he had opted for silence some 49 years earlier, at the Festival of Britain.
Now, just prior to giving up the ghost on his hundredth birthday, he opts to tell his story. This story-telling is both an unburdening and an act of agency. The mute master of pantomime is in all truth a supreme verbal artificer.
Scaramouche Jones speaks up for all the voiceless. At seven crisis points in the narrative, he identifies a white mask which settled over his face, a certain attitude or expression indicative of the state of his soul. That number seven has deep resonance of course: the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit; the seven joys and seven sorrows of Mary.
With the sharing of his story, Jones unburdens himself and is able to slough off the debilitating masks. He is a representative everyman figure, an anti-hero, risible in the eyes of the powerful but full of empathy and grace.
Clowns are predominantly associated with comedy but there are of course sad clowns and clowns are often abject failures, open to taunts. The twin masks of theatre, of tragedy and comedy, apply to Scaramouche Jones. Christ too was both ‘a tragic actor born’ and portrayed as a fool, all clad in white, when mocked and beaten in the passion pageants of the mystery plays. St Francis of Assisi too was known as ‘God’s Jester’.
Like Christ and St Francis, the protagonist here is full of love and empathy for those suffering, most notably the soon to be exterminated children in the death camps. In his compassionate pantomime he enacts for them, he ends by metamorphosing into a fluttering angel. ‘Flights of angels sing you to your rest.’ Even as the lighting makes him look like a death’s head, he evokes the never-extinguished hope of the Requiem Mass, present too at the end of Hamlet (a play full of Catholic maimed rites), that death is not the end, but that those suffering will rise in glory, finding a true home in Heaven. And in a further nod to the clown-prince Hamlet, he has told the children’s (and his Scaramouche Jones’s) story.
Butcher has triumphantly carried forward the baton for Erasmus’s Mask of Folly (itself a punning homage to St Thomas More with its Latin title Morae Encomium) in which vicious human folly is gathered up into an all-compassionate divine folly of wisdom and virtue.
Everything comes together in a superb production, beautifully directed by Guy Masterson. Damian Hale’s sensitive video design is mercifully unintrusive and complements Butcher’s beautiful verbal picture-painting. The overshadowing of the afflicted seven white masks was particularly well done.
Finally, Butcher’s physical, gestural acting and clowning are on a par with his excellent multi-voiced verbal delivery. His Scaramouche Jones is a holy fool who ends his story by blowing out a candle in a tableau worthy of Georges de la Tour. ‘Out brief candle.’ His life is over. The motley has shuffled off this mortal coil. But we are left dazzled and transfigured by such humanity. (Philip Crispin - Independent Catholic Media - 25/06/21)
- NORTHWESTEND.com
https://northwestend.com/?p=3505
“50 years to make the clown. 50 years to play the clown.”
This closing remark, delivered by the centenarian clown Scaramouche as he waits for the clock to strike midnight and usher in the new millennium, is perhaps the closest to capturing the essence of this astonishing odyssey of the 20th century. Scaramouche Jones or the Seven White Masks recounts the extraordinary life of a man’s journey through crumbling empires, comic misadventures, dark episodes and tragic discoveries on a quest to understand why he is who he is. From tales of his birth in slim alleys of Trinidad and his escapades on the busy streets of Milan, to the haunting memories of concentration camps in Eastern Europe and the exhilaration of finally being on English soil, this text not only gives us a glimpse into what went behind shaping Scaramouche’s seven white masks but also reveals a profoundly moving anthology of the last century’s biggest happenings through his eyes. Twenty years on from its acclaimed premiere in Edinburgh, starring the late actor Pete Postlethwaite, the play returns to Wilton’s Musical Hall in Shadwell with Justin Butcher playing the titular role of his script. The original creative team is joined by Guy Masterson for this special revival that hopes to bring humour and hope to the lives of audiences members, whose return to live theatre after an exceptionally tough, unprecedented year can be compared to the trials and tribunals suffered by Scaramouche as he found himself in situations outside his control.
Justin Butcher is simply brilliant as Scaramouche, delivering a 100-minute-long monologue without breaking a sweat. His command and delivery of the text is exceptional, using his body and voice effectively to open up the rapid, frenetic pace of Scaramouche’s life story to the audience which isn’t an easy job. What’s most striking is Butcher’s subtle ways of referencing the concepts and ideas of commedia dell’arte in both the text, such as the use of masks to delineate different parts of Scaramouche’s life as well as the subtle nod to Figaro’s marriage, and his own performance, which brings together a contemporary acting storytelling style with traditional movement and mime work. This is complemented by a stellar set and costume based on the original design by Ashley Martin-Davis that provides the performer the freedom to establish the clowning vocabulary and tropes that an audience is able to connect with instantly, as well as the ability to effectively use the space to traverse between different eras and locations. With Tom Turner’s light design and Damian Hale’s video design, the end result is a visual spectacle that is delightful to watch, combining hand-drawn projections and swift lighting changes that immerse the audience into the larger themes and concepts being introduced by the titular character.
To summarise, this revival of Scaramouche Jones or the Seven White Masks is as dazzling and haunting as the day it premiered twenty years ago and promises to leave you with a lot of questions around loss, identity and change… perhaps with a stronger appreciation for the magical in the mundane. (Gaurav Singh Nijjer - Northwestend - 17/06/21)
BRITISH THEATRE GUIDE
https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/scaramouche-jon-wilton-s-music-19964
It was a hell of a century. Think of any atrocity, any great social struggle and you are likely to have landed in the 20th century. That troubled century has created some memorable monsters, but it has also generated some striking theatrical achievements.
Justin Butcher shows how this happens with a fitting symbol of that awful period, the clown Scaramouche Jones on the eve of the 21st century remembering his life, from his birth on December the 31, 1899 in Trinidad to an unknown English father and a gypsy prostitute later murdered, sold to a slaver who takes him across the world, married to a twelve-year-old girl to save her from police brutality, rescued into Mussolini's Italy by an Italian diplomat who fancies him, finding himself in a Nazi death camp digging the mass graves of people about to be machine-gunned, learning all the time visual and other ways to channel the suffering.
His clownish antics by the edge of the grave mocking the Nazi killers create a poignant scene. It is also the event that prompts the seventh painting of his face white, a mask shaped by the horror around him, the seven masks echoing the words of the melancholic Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It speaking about the seven ages of man.
Scaramouche Jones (Justin Butcher) explains to us on the eve of the 21st century that it takes “50 years to make the clown, 50 years to play the clown". And in his final remarkable mimed performance, we recognise the shape of that century passing.
There are few laughs in this story but many moving moments in a monologue that identifies the complicated madness of a terrible world. (Keith McKenna - BTG - 17/06/21)
- THE UPCOMING 16/06/21
https://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2021/06/15/scaramouche-jones-or-the-seven-white-masks-at-wiltons-music-hall-theatre-review/
Scaramouche Jones is a curious show. Premiered in 2001, it offers a strangely comical and tragic take on the history of the 20th century, told as the rumination of a dying 100-year-old clown on New Year’s Eve 1999 as he opens up to the audience to retell his story. His was a strange life with many ups and downs, and the result is a glorious one-hander with stellar acting.
Writer and performer Justin Butcher stars as Scaramouche Jones, who is born on 31st December 1899 to a gypsy prostitute and an Englishman in Trinidad. Growing up, his unlikely journey takes him across the Atlantic to Africa as a slave, towards Europe with an Italian prince, and finally to a Nazi concentration camp, where he is spared the death sentence, thanks to his white appearance, and is condemned to dig the graves of the prisoners instead. In this most macabre of situations, he quite literally becomes a clown, trying to make the children laugh for one last time before they are killed.
The theme of the tearful clown is hardly new – and here, too, it remains consistent; indeed, one of the central lines is that, “it takes 50 years to make the clown, and 50 years to play the clown”. We are all clowns, to some extent, and his life is the prime example of this. Despite verging on the border of cliché, the theme becomes particularly harrowing when juxtaposed with the realities of the concentration camp and Jones’s desire to help people find happiness even in the most unlikely of places. It’s all very operatic – but in an effective way.
From quirky and absurd to bleakly desperate, the clown’s life is a rollercoaster of emotion. This is part of what makes Scaramouche stand out. It is astonishingly gripping thanks to Butcher’s performance; his delivery is always apt and often moving. The production, too, is fantastic, thanks to the direction of Guy Masterson, who gathers a great team with Adam Cork’s excellent music and impressive sound design creating a subtle, atmospheric impact.
Scaramouche Jones or The Seven White Masks is simply a brilliant piece of writing, brought to life by a talented cast of creatives who know exactly what they are doing – and it shows. Even 20 years later, this piece maintains its power and deserves a hearty recommendation. (Michael Higgs - The Upcoming - 16/06/21)
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