Guest Blog: Playwright Justin Butcher On Reviving the Adventuresome Spirit of Scaramouche Jones

In 2001, the late, great Pete Postlethwaite premiered Scaramouche Jones at the Dublin Theatre Festival prior to a UK tour the following year. Now, this solo picaresque has been digitally revived for the actor Shane Richie and directed by Olivier nominee Ian Talbot. This new production has in turn allowed playwright Justin Butcher the chance to reflect (below) on how this piece of writing first came to be.

I wrote Scaramouche Jones in the final months of 1999, while I was away in Holland directing a TV series, primarily as an amusement for myself in the evenings. I was bored, and I'd had a series of unsatisfying jobs, writing and directing stuff to commission for other people, so this was going to be my thing, all mine, commissioned by me (although I didn't pay myself anything), written by me, performed by me.

Millennium fever was in the air; what would happen when the millennium bug bit, and the clocks went zero-zero? We had a big cultural "white elephant" - the Millennium Dome, a vast (and vastly expensive) exhibition space which the previous (Conservative) government had committed us to, and now the New Labour government had to see it completed. The project became the stuff of political football: what was to be exhibited in it, and who was to decide? A fabulous, multi-media, multi-disciplinary once-in-a-generation exhibition showcasing the glories of British culture over the past thousand years was the modest mission statement, but every time a creative director was appointed, the government sacked him. It was looking like the whole thing was going to turn into a big, expensive joke - a monument to the quintessential vacuity of British culture in the year 2000.

So I set myself the task of writing a kind of comic, satirical tale of the millennium: the solo story of a bumbling haphazard everyman figure, born from the conjunction of the lofty "purity" of the white European overlord with the "bastardy" of the gypsy underdog. Here was a picaresque anti-hero who stumbled through some of the greatest historical events of the past hundred years offering a clown's-eye view and a cock-eyed squint at the twentieth century.

Since the only goal was to write something 100% attuned to my own tastes (and if anyone else liked it, so much the better), I cheerfully chucked all my favourite ingredients into the pot: a lifelong fascination with clowns; the fate of the lost race known as the English, stranded in the backwash of the colonial era having scattered their irresistible absurdities across much of the globe; the Boys' Own yarn-spinning of Conan Doyle, Haggard, Buchan and Kipling; the weird displacements and upheavals of populations and cultures through 20th century wars and disasters. The whole was to be threaded together by a vague thought of adding my own ten penn'orth to all the millennial pomp and circumstance crowding the airwaves at the time of writing.

Through pillaging the exploits of my own patchwork family, whose web of intersections meanders (like Scaramouche) across Trinidad, West Africa, Italy, Poland and even the Nuremberg Trials (the Hon Justice Percy Rawlins was my great-uncle), with snakes, concentration camps and grave-faced actors thrown in, Scaramouche Jones also became an experiment in personal myth-making. And so the tale is dedicated with great affection and gratitude to my family in memory of their adventures throughout the craziest, bloodiest and yet most bountiful century in human history.

Through the tales of my family, my mother's upbringing, the Polish and Italian uncles and aunts, the Nigerian foster-sisters and brothers etc, the world came to me before I ever started travelling the world. But look, all writers steal, I guess; writers are magpies, collecting shiny objects, gems and jewels of pungent experience, oddities and exotic events, impressions, images, characters wherever they roam.

I've been immeasurably fortunate to have the opportunity to travel and work all over the world, and working with real people on the ground, especially in making theatre, is a whole lot more real than just being a tourist. You have to learn how to do things and say things in another language, another culture, discover and rejoice in the strangeness of those cultures, experience how people in those countries react to you, and in the end, of course, discover how on some basic level, we're all the same.

Ionesco described our experience of theatre as dépaysement - literally, losing one's country - in which the familiar (our life, our loves, our hopes and fears, our horrors, our laughter) is made strange, clothed in unfamiliar faces, characters and stories, and experienced as if for the first time. The storyteller takes you by the hand and leads you to a strange, magical, far-away land and tells you an enchanting story about fabulous people and places you've never seen - and in the end, you realise it was a story about you.

Scaramouche Jones is available to stream from 26 March until 11 April

The play can be seen live from 15-26 June at Wilton's Music Hall

Photo credit: Bonnie Britain

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