"Scaramouche Jones". St Barnabas

Food For Thought is a pioneering theatre company that mounts productions in unconventional venues around Oxford. Going to see their plays is not just a dramatic experience but a historically illuminating one too. Last year they became the first theatre company ever to use the Pitt Rivers Museum as a performance space with their brilliantly creative reworking of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

For Scaramouche Jones they’ve turned to St Barnabas Church in Jericho, and it’s a breathtaking location: perhaps the most spectacular church in Oxford. Arts and Crafts murals in cut glass gaze down on the Italianate mouldings of a Tardis-like Basilica. It’s a place that has always been supportive of local arts, and it makes a fantastic theatre.

Justin Butcher’s one-man play started life as a radio piece in 2001, before the late, great Pete Postlethwaite took it on tour. It’s a truly beguiling concept: a hundred-year-old clown, on the last night of his life, 31^st December 1999, recounts his story, as he drifts like a piece of flotsam through the horror tides of the Twentieth Century, from his infancy in a Trinidadian fishmonger’s, through working as an assistant snake-charmer in Africa, to Mussolini’s Italy, and ultimately making children laugh in their final moments before execution in the concentration camps of Poland.

There is an everyman quality to Scaramouche’s story. He repeatedly tells us ‘We are legion’, and he acts as an innocent, Zelig-like chorus to the events that shaped the last century. He could almost be the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, finding a twisted and tragic humour in the devastation around him. Almost – but not quite.

Despite having a talented actor in James Billington (he played the central role of Dr Jekyll in Food For Thought’s last production), and despite the atmospheric location and simple but effective lighting and set design, Scaramouche Jones never really takes flight. I felt like I was in a Boeing 747 that just refused to leave the runway no matter how many buttons the pilot pressed. And the dead weight that was keeping it earthbound was the script. I appreciate that Scaramouche himself is supposed to be elaborate and wordy, a kind of poetic observer and interpreter, but when every single thing he says is draped in elaboration, then listening to him becomes a bit like wading through treacle. Almost every noun in this play is accompanied by one or more adjectives: the coast is distant; the Labour Party is infant, short and bow-legged; faces are brown and wizened; mouths are astonished; renditions are sonorous. Ideally, Scaramouche should be conjuring visions of Venice, Auschwitz and Trinidad, making the audience see, feel and smell these places with his words and actions. But sadly – and in spite of Herculean efforts on the part of Billington and his acting – that just doesn’t happen. It’s heavy and dense, and Scaramouche sadly lacks one thing this character needs above all: charisma.

In quieter moments, when the words fall away, the play genuinely comes to life. For me, the most riveting scene came when Scaramouche performed his silent routine for the children in the concentration camp just before they were machine-gunned into a pit. It had that combination of tenderness and ghastly horror that Roberto Benigni portrayed so brilliantly in Life is Beautiful, protecting his son from the horrors of a Nazi death camp by turning them into a game.

A clown’s life story may be a tale told by an idiot. This one is certainly full of sound and fury. But rather than signifying nothing, I left feeling as though it is just trying to signify a bit too much.