Thom Tuck on reviving his old clown character Scaramouche Jones

Scaramouche Jones | Thom Tuck

Ever since my first taste of Edinburgh in August 1999 (for a two-week run of West Side Story), I felt sure that missing out on the annual cavalcade of artistry and tomfoolery was no longer an option. I returned to the city to study (MA in Mental Philosophy) and, saving the years lost to COVID, have never missed a year since.

I lived in the city for six years, and if you include the extra Augusts, I’ve scrounged another 16 months. For most of this time, my home from home was the Bedlam Theatre: the neo-Gothic edifice that sits, with its red nose of a door, at the bottom of George IV Bridge. It was where I first performed the show I am doing this year: Scaramouche Jones.

It is the story of a hundred-year-old clown, set in 1999 after his final performance on Millennium Eve. He shambles backstage and recounts the tale of how he acquired a facility for funny, his white mask and… his nose. It is a haunting, elegiac, poetic and unforgettably funny story that weaves its way around the world: Trinidad, Senegal, Venice, London and beyond. It is never mentioned where that last show is taking place, perhaps because it could be anywhere… but I like to think it’s Edinburgh.

This city is wondrous year-round: a wind tunnel designed by M.C. Escher, a skyline that rips your breath away in the creeping, crepuscular sunsets, and an agglomeration of drinking establishments that can satisfy any thirst… if you know the right corner to turn down.

And on top of this, for one month a year, it invites upon itself a horde of the strangest, funniest, and most brilliant people in the world. And they are all trying their best to create more magic in a place already full of it.

That first run at the Bedlam Theatre was in 2005, the summer after I finished my degree, and flew fairly squarely under the critical and commercial radars. The next summer, I started my sketch group The Penny Dreadfuls with other recent graduates, and with it, my professional career.

We did historical-themed comedy inspired, at least in part, by the weight of history that surrounds one everywhere in the Old Town, and it propelled us to Radio 4 and beyond.

As a decade rolled on, I came up every summer with new and multifarious projects: improv shows, plays, stand-up and a late-night jamboree called The Alternative Comedy Memorial Society, a strange award-winning pub quiz experiment. But as the years ticked their merrymaking way along, I thought to myself: "Should I visit the clown again?"

I would be ten years closer to the age of the character, ten years wiser and more skilled as a performer, ten years more able to draw a crowd.

And so I dug out the greasepaint and the zebra print shoes, the waistcoat and the moth-bitten trousers, the wig and my little red nose, and once again tackled this writhing leviathan of a play. As Fringe '15 approached it struck me more profoundly than before, the odd parallels between myself and Scaramouche.

Like him, I travelled the world peripatetically for the first part of my life: Sri Lanka, Malawi, the Philippines, Bangladesh. Like him, I have found that making people laugh is the thing I do best, and love most. And, like him, I hate it when a juggler ruins my crossword.

And so, here we are 20 years later. I have resolved to perform this show every decade as I approach the appropriate age (or something like it) and have a chance to look back on the previous iterations and the years in between. Learning the lines again feels like writing a memoir where none of the memories are mine. But the experiences are.

The places we spend time have no choice but to imprint themselves on us. From the Buckfast graveyard of the Cowgate to the bucolic spokes of the Meadows, from the dripping vaults to the precipitous winding of Cockburn Street, from the glory of the Zoo on the side of Corstorphine Hill to the Potterrow Port underpass, outside of which a yurt will stand this summer serving as the latest dressing room of the clown.

Scaramouche Jones, Hoots @ Potterrow, 2.45pm, until 25 August

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