PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Alma Tavern Theatre, Bristol (Tue 13-Sat 17 Dec)

THEATRE This one man play opens backstage in a shabby circus tent, where the world weary clown Scaramouche Jones steps down from the stage after his final performance. It's New Year's Eve 1999, and Jones will be one hundred years old on the stroke of midnight – the moment he has also chosen to die. "Fear and delight" – virtually his first words to us - is how Scaramouche sums up a life of pain, both his own and that of others he has witnessed across the century.

In the 100 minutes he has left, Jones tells his life story – from his birth on a fishmonger's slab in Trinidad's Port of Spain, the son of a gypsy whore, and on through fifty years of clowning. “Fifty years to make a clown, fifty years to play one”, is how he puts it. Along the way he weaves a captivating and meandering story of snake-charmers, slave traders, European fascism, the Holocaust and 1951's Festival of Britain, where he achieves his ambition to become an Englishman. Scaramouche never knew his father – it could have been any one of his mother's clients – but he was born blessed (or perhaps cursed) with a white face, so he might just be English. Over the years, as a result of layer upon layer of trauma and suffering, his face becomes whiter and whiter until he finally embraces his fate and adopts the clown's traditional white make up. His face has sealed his fate.

100 minutes is a decent length of time for one performer to command a stage but Alan Coveney is spellbinding. With minimal props, Coveney makes what is essentially an extended soliloquy into a powerful and moving theatrical experience. He tilts a mirror to reflect a spotlight onto a curtain and he's beneath a full moon; a casually raised arm becomes his volunteering for a perilous rescue. These tiny, subtle movements are tremendously effective. Director Emel Yilmaz is fortunate to have an actor as good as Coveney, but clever enough to recognise how he can tell the story using little more than his own extremely expressive voice and body.

Scaramouche's most dreadful memory is the part he played as an unwilling gravedigger in a concentration camp. In an attempt to entertain the children about to die, he would perform a comic mime behind the backs of the German soldiers – a mime which ends with the executed children rising from their mass graves as angels. Coveney performs this mime with extraordinary power and grace. It's a heartbreaking moment – all the more emotional for being performed in total silence – that gets to the heart of the play. Scaramouche believes that in a world of suffering the most any of us can do is to at least try to raise a smile – however hopeless the circumstances.

Justin Butcher's play is not without flaws. It's certainly over-written in places and the florid prose makes many sections feel more literary than conversational – but then who deserves a final chance to use such language, if not a mime artist who has stayed silent for so much of his life? It's also something of a potted 20th-century history lesson, with events like the Holocaust so telegraphed that they loom on the horizon for ages.

But these are tiny niggles. Scaramouche's life story falls into seven distinct chapters which finally come together to form an elegant and satisfying whole. The play is beautifully constructed, and has an unexpected connection with Bristol: it was first performed at the Old Vic in 2002 by Pete Postlethwaite. As a graduate of the theatre's drama school, Postlethwaite wanted to open the play in the city where he trained. Following his performance must have been daunting for Coveney. But he needn't have worried: his is a wonderfully accomplished performance; a tour de force of laughter and tears that will disappoint no-one. Fear and delight, indeed. (Andy Batten-Foster)

Copyright Andy Batten-Foster 2011

Pic: Mike Kleinsteuber