Where on earth is everybody?
Justin Butcher is giving what is arguably the finest one-man performance I have seen at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Scaramouche Jones is theatre-making and storytelling of the absolute highest quality.
And the Bijou tent is barely a quarter full.
What is going on?
Butcher’s Scaramouche Jones has been travelling the world for 25 years. Pete Postlethwaite originated the role, directed by Rupert Goold, and the play itself has subsequently travelled internationally. Maybe nobody wants to see a 25-year-old play, or perhaps it is just not to the ‘modern’ palate.
Whatever the reason, what a joy it was to discover.
On Millennium Eve, 1999, Scaramouche stands on the brink of his hundredth birthday and takes us back through an extraordinary life spanning almost the entire twentieth century. Conceived in Barbados, he becomes traveller, survivor and eventually clown, gathering the seven white faces that gradually construct Scaramouche Jones.
Yet describing the plot hardly begins to describe the experience.
There is poetry in Butcher’s language, a lyricism and an exotic tang that seems almost to hang in the air. Close your eyes and you might be atop a camel. A moment later you are rattling across another country on a railway train, then aboard a boat heading towards another continent. Landscapes appear from words. Heat, dust, sea and distance seem to materialise around you.
You don’t simply hear Scaramouche Jones tell you where he has been. For 90 minutes, you travel with him.
And what a journey. Across countries, cultures and continents, through encounters comic, fantastical and increasingly dark, Butcher takes us into places most of us will never visit and ultimately towards some of the terrible realities of wartime Europe. The poetry never disguises the horror. If anything, its beauty makes those destinations still more affecting.
Under Guy Masterson’s assured direction, projection, lighting and sound become intimate fellow travellers. They don’t overwhelm the storyteller but gently enlarge his world, allowing a tent in Edinburgh to become somewhere altogether more alluring and mysterious.
At the centre of everything is Butcher. Characters emerge and disappear almost before you notice the transformation. Comedy turns to pathos, pathos into horror and then, somehow, back towards joy. This is a performer completely in command of his material and an audience.
Perhaps 25 years explains some of that assurance. Scaramouche Jones feels like a polished gem, a rare jewel that has travelled around the world. Every rough edge has been smoothed through years of performance until it arrives here gleaming.
Which makes that quarter-full tent all the more extraordinary.
Maybe everyone else has already seen Scaramouche Jones. Fine. But if, like me, you haven’t, get yourself down to the Bijou and watch a master at work. A master of comedy, a master of pathos and, above everything else, a master of the sheer joy of storytelling.
For 90 minutes he will lead you a merry dance, in fact he will take you around the world.
All you have to do is turn up.
Playing until August 30th 2026, https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/2026SCARAMO
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 20th August 2026
North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr 30mins