On creating Clown

We are rehearsing William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. I am Clown.

This is something of a new venture for me. I've done a fair bit of theatre, including actually getting a degree in the stuff at some point in my increasingly misty past, but nothing like this. Recently I have been mostly cast in the role of a miserable, misguided, middle-aged man. Think Superintendent in Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist; Father in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author; Duke in Pratchett/Briggs' Wyrd Sisters; Moulsworth in Ustinov's Romanoff and Juliet. If you know any of those, you get the drift. They are all disturbed.

Clown is an innocent. He's not the fastest armadillo on the highway, certainly, but he has an essentially good heart. So now my challenge is to exorcise the spirits of productions past and get into rustic mode.

Maybe one of the hardest aspects is reversing other people's expectations. Clown has a bit of a love life, unlike some, and this includes the occasional roll in the hay with a shepherdess called Mopsa. In real life, the wonderful performer playing Mopsa is some twenty years younger than me. A recent set of photographs from rehearsals illustrated this very clearly, and now the group expectation seems to be for me to go down the dirty-old-man road of Pirandello's Father.

No, I have to shout. I am not Father, I am Clown.

Can I be Romeo next time, please?