Scaramouche Jones, born at midnight on December 31 1899, a strange, pale, white-skinned "oyster" who popped out of his Gypsy prostitute mother in a fishmongers in Trinidad. A man of the 20th century, buffeted this way and that by the tides of chance and change, caught up in the currents of madness of that swirling, cruel, ridiculous century.
Orphaned, exiled and sold into slavery into a single day, apprenticed to a Latin-speaking African snake-charmer, rescued by an Italian homosexual prince who transports him towards Venice and a masked ball where Mussolini will preside, then falling in with Gypsies heading to sell shoes in Poland, Scaramouche ends up in a concentration camp in Croatia where his white face saves him from death. He becomes the digger of mass graves, a clown who makes the children laugh as they stand on the edge of the pit waiting to be shot.
Scaramouche Jones is a traveller of the world and an extra at some of the great and terrible events of the past century. Now as the clocks tick towards midnight at "the very arse-end of the 20th century", 100-year-old Scaramouche reflects on his life, peeling back the masks to tell of "50 years to make the clown, 50 years to play the clown".
It would be easy to dismiss Justin Butcher's one-man play as a piece of glorified radio (it was actually done on Radio 4 in 2001), but the rich, fishy stew of the writing combines with Rupert Goold's elegant direction and Pete Postlethwaite's wonderfully judged performance to create a mesmerising piece of storytelling theatre. The cliche "the tears of a clown" becomes new-minted in Postlethwaite's performance; he finds in Scaramouche the tragic and the ludicrous, an Everyman on a bumpy odyssey through the century.
· Until April 13. Box office: 0117-987 7877. Then tours.
