One-person plays are difficult to pull off, and take, ironically for something so scaled-down, a multitude of factors to work successfully. The performer must be likeable, there have to be enough shades of grey in the writing and the performance to sustain an audience’s attention, and so on.

Scaramouche Jones attempts this by painting a story of some of the 20th century’s most important moments through the eyes of a clown. The titular character was born in Trinidad to a lady of ill-repute, before escaping across the seas to a life that would include slavery and experience of concentration camps. He comes to the audience on the eve of the New Millennium, in 1999.

The play was made famous by Pete Postlethwaite in the West End in 2001. This time the playwright, Justin Butcher, performs it. He clearly knows the wordy piece inside out, and performs the play with incredible enthusiasm.

But this enthusiasm could be taken for self-indulgence. Jones is a verbose character, delighting in purple prose and many idiosyncracies. Butcher does not hold back, and frequently comes across as overbearing and noisy, as opposed to attention grabbing and lively. It is unrelenting too; the play is performed without an interval. Proceedings do get considerably darker and more disturbing as the evening draws to a close, and this is when Butcher’s larger than life performance gains some credibility. Until this point, however, I found the whole thing pretty unappealing.

Having not seen the production before, I can’t say if the piece itself is also at fault, as the structure requires watching until the very end to understand machinations. However, I would be interested to see it again. Its ambitions and complicated writing take a while to digest. Mixing issues of race and personal identity with elements of fantasy, self-conscious theatricality and Boys’ Own adventure stories, it’s certainly an imaginative and original experience. But be aware of Justin Butcher, the performer, pulled along the street by an enthusiastic canine hell bent on getting to the park.