Scaramouche Jones : or The Seven White Masks (Methuen Drama)

Rating:
Summary: Butcher delivers "an obscene and enchanting spectacle"
Review: "Scaramouche Jones; or, The Seven White Masks," by Justin Butcher, is a one-act play for one actor. The title character--a clown about to mark his 100th birthday--tells the audience the story of his life, which spans the 20th century. The monologue begins with his beginnings as the child of a Gypsy prostitute in Trinidad and proceeds as his adventures take him across various countries.

Early in the play the clown promises "an obscene and enchanting spectacle that will thrill you and revolt you." The entire text of the play only fills 32 pages, but into this concise space Butcher created a work with global vision and an epic sweep. Scaramouche's story is tragic, comic, and richly ironic; his monologue is full of fascinating characters and compelling situations.

This Methuen edition contains an 11-page long, unpaginated prefatory section with information about the play's production history. The play was first performed at the Samuel Beckett Theatre for the Dublin Theatre Festival 2001, and received its first UK performance in 2002. Also noted is that playwright Butcher studied at Oxford and trained at Drama Studio London.

Butcher's language pulses and crackles with life. In Scaramouche's words he weaves a pungent yet elegant poetry that is spiced with multilingual flourishes and multicultural references. Although I have never seen it performed, I can say that the play succeeds brilliantly as a reader's text. Scaramouche is an amazing character. Ultimately this play is a moving meditation on loss, lust, and power, as well as on history, justice, and national identity.

Rating:
Summary: Butcher delivers "an obscene and enchanting spectacle"
Review: "Scaramouche Jones; or, The Seven White Masks," by Justin Butcher, is a one-act play for one actor. The title character--a clown about to mark his 100th birthday--tells the audience the story of his life, which spans the 20th century. The monologue begins with his beginnings as the child of a Gypsy prostitute in Trinidad and proceeds as his adventures take him across various countries.

Early in the play the clown promises "an obscene and enchanting spectacle that will thrill you and revolt you." The entire text of the play only fills 32 pages, but into this concise space Butcher created a work with global vision and an epic sweep. Scaramouche's story is tragic, comic, and richly ironic; his monologue is full of fascinating characters and compelling situations.

This Methuen edition contains an 11-page long, unpaginated prefatory section with information about the play's production history. The play was first performed at the Samuel Beckett Theatre for the Dublin Theatre Festival 2001, and received its first UK performance in 2002. Also noted is that playwright Butcher studied at Oxford and trained at Drama Studio London.

Butcher's language pulses and crackles with life. In Scaramouche's words he weaves a pungent yet elegant poetry that is spiced with multilingual flourishes and multicultural references. Although I have never seen it performed, I can say that the play succeeds brilliantly as a reader's text. Scaramouche is an amazing character. Ultimately this play is a moving meditation on loss, lust, and power, as well as on history, justice, and national identity.

Rating:
Summary: "I bare myself...to the Great Mystery beyond the Door ofNight.
Review: First performed in 2001 in Dublin, Justin Butcher's Scaramouche Jones is a fascinating one-man "play" in which a clown, Scaramouche Jones, relives his life and contemplates his death at the age of one hundred. Born at midnight on December 31, 1899, Scaramouche will die as the Millenium begins, having witnessed major events of the twentieth century, which he brings to life and explores, not just as a clown who has acquired seven masks during his lifetime, but as an everyman, giving breadth and universality to this drama.

The son of an "Ethiop" gypsy mother living in Trinidad and a British father, long gone, his first mask is his pale skin. When his mother is killed, he, then six, begins his travels, first being sold to a slave trader by a priest who is taking him to a "mission school." His second mask is the salt he acquires on a sailing dhow to Africa, and the third, a concoction of white goat's milk paste used to keep away evil spirits in northern Africa. The fourth is frost deposited while he is sleeping in Venice, and the fifth is his pallor after being beaten bloody by caribinieri in Milan for being a gypsy. His sixth mask comes from the lime he is forced to shovel into mass graves of a concentration camp, and his seventh, a clown's face paint.

At every stage of Scaramouche's story, the author compares Scaramouche's life as an outsider, a man who is denied life's "blessings" and who often lives in Third World societies, to what is happening in mainstream European history, bringing the contrasts to life. Butcher creates vivid word pictures and elicits extraordinary sympathy for Scaramouche, at the same time that he gives Scaramouche strength, a sense of honor, and, ultimately, heroic stature. Scaramouche's stories are vivid, the characters he meets are often fascinating, the mood varies from humor to sadness, and the ironies are palpable. It is a testament to Butcher's ear for conversational language that Scaramouche's speech sounds so real. Though this is a one-person play, it feels much bigger as Scaramouche's tales incorporate a wide variety of other characters and are grounded in twentieth century events.

This edition incorporates a number of photographs from the production by the Bristol Old Vic in 2002, with Pete Postlethwaite as Scaramouche. His ability to establish and sustain moods is vividly demonstrated in the photographs and provides the reader with a context for this long monologue. An outstanding twenty-first century drama by a playwright who is still in his thirties, Scaramouche suggests a long and successful career for this writer. Mary Whipple