Interview: Justin Butcher on the Enduring Tragedy of ‘Scaramouche Jones’

Justin Butcher is an actor, writer, director, and musician, best known for his play Scaramouche Jones, which he wrote in 1999. The play premiered in 2001 starring Pete Postlethwaite, and has since been performed around the world. For its 25th anniversary, Butcher is taking on the leading role of the tragic clown. He chats to SNACK about bringing audiences on a journey through the 20th century, filled with sorrow, loss, but ultimately hope.

Could you tell me about your play?

It’s a magical, tragic, comic journey through the 20th century, from the perspective of a perpetual underdog and outsider. Scaramouche Jones is a kind of hapless, comic everyman figure, buffeted by the winds of fate from one extreme disaster to the next, and intersecting with some of the great historical events of the 20th century, and all his adventures are propelled by this weird white face that he’s been born with.

The play carries with it a lot of reflections on identity, race, empire, Englishness, borders, passports, and identity.

What was your inspiration for writing the play?

I found when I came to write the play at the end of ’99, I wanted to write something fun and really for myself. My mission statement was to write something flagrantly self-indulgent and shamelessly attuned to my own tastes, and if anybody else liked it, so much the better. Guess what? It’s turned out to be the most successful thing I’ve ever written.

I was wanting to memorialise the adventures of my own family in the 20th century, and so what I ended up doing was plundering real stories from my family. My family is a great patchwork of Nigerians, Trinidadians, Italians, Poles, also very blasted apart by tragedy. In many ways, there are too many stories threading through the 20th century of people dying in various ways, and so maybe part of the urge was to lovingly weave together some of these stories in a piece of art, that was expressing my love for them.

How has your relationship to the play changed over the last 25 years?

On a technical level, I find myself wanting to dip in and out of the narrative more, to take more moments where he’s the old man reflecting, and then dive back into the live action. Whereas, when I first performed it back in 2008, I was very immersed.

I think the latent tragedy which is in the play hits me harder now. Scaramouche loses his mother when he’s about six in a tragic fashion and his life is full of loss. Obviously, I wrote it with a serious thought in mind. I’d been through a big tragedy myself, but I still think, at age 30 or whatever I was when I wrote it, there’s a depth and a perspective, perhaps of pain, sorrow, empathy, compassion, or something that you just can’t access at that age. But when you’re 57, which I am now, you can. So I think it’s deeper, wider, darker, but brighter as well. There’s a kind of bright sadness in the play.

What do you hope audiences take from the play?

When I was writing in ’99, there was a feeling in the zeitgeist that the Cold War was over, communism had come to an end, so that was all great. They were all talking about the end of history, how communism had lost, and all we had to do was shop and be happy. What I wanted to try to do in the play was to remember the great dangers and atrocities of the 20th century.

I felt this need to retell some of the stories of the horrors of empire, fascism, war, and the terrible plight of people who find themselves on the wrong side of a border, because no, history is not over. We’re doing it all again. So that’s to say, the play feels more relevant for audiences than ever.

If you were to write a sequel, of the 21st century, what themes do you think you would include in it, and how similar do you think it would be?

The gigantic change is the information technology revolution that the generation of my children have grown up with. I often feel that the younger generations have been like lambs sent off to slaughter, nobody knew what the impact would be of having communication devices in your pocket 24/7.

And then the new wars of empire, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it’s the old game of empire and colonialism, but with a new name, isn’t it? Refugee crises and migration as well. That’s one of the most tragic and widespread images of the first quarter of the 21st century: refugees on small boats. And then, the corresponding rise of a new form of fascism.

It’s not a very cheery picture, but I’m sure that if I came to write something, if I really did sit down to try to write a part two of Scaramouche Jones, I’d be wanting to tell stories of hope in and amongst that.

Scaramouche Jones is at Bijou at Assembly at St Andrew Square, 6th till 30th August (except 12th)

Words: Juliet Gartside

Photo credit: Annie Kruntcheva