EDINBURGH 2025: Thom Tuck Guest Blog

Thom Tuck guest blogs for BWW ahead of bringing Scaramouche Jones to the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The very first time I did the Fringe was in 1999, the very arse-end of the 20th century. I was seventeen years old and like four or five other whippersnappers from the Theatre Studies course at Notre Dame Sixth Form College in Leeds, I had snagged a part in a semi-professional production of West Side Story. I was playing several sharks, and my character subsequently made precious little sense… being, as he was, merely a receptacle for collections of orphaned scraps of script. The show was shoehorned into a dangerously small space in the Bonnington Resource Centre (not particularly in the centre of the action at the Fringe) that made the choreography seem “not so much in-your-face as nearly in-your-lap” - The Herald. We had a wild old time. And I thought, I have to come back to this place.

And from 2002, and for the next twenty three Augusts (bar Covid), I have been in Edinburgh. Doing improv, plays, stand-up, sketch shows, kids shows, directing, watching, drinking in the glorious insanity that is the fringe. You build up quite the roster of friends and colleagues if you keep coming back. On every street corner, in every dim-lit artist bar, there’s a catalogue of comedians with whom you don’t get the chance to intersect all that often. And then there’s the clown: the clown who I only get to see every ten years, like some sort of painted cicada.

I was first cast as the titular mirthbringer Scaramouche Jones whilst still at university. I was starting the final year of my degree in Mental Philosophy at Edinburgh University but, like all the other years, my focus had been squarely on activities in the Bedlam theatre - a neo-gothic homunculus at the bottom of George IV Bridge. I auditioned for the role but did not get it; the part going, instead, to the playwright Al Smith (perhaps best known for his Radio 4 series Life Lines). Two days later, he quit. There were just too many words, he said. And so, I landed the role of a lifetime after being clearly second-best for the job.

I had twelve days to learn the behemoth of a script and I then performed it once. It went well enough that we put on a second run of five whole nights at the Roxy round the corner, and thence to Scarborough. That fair town used to host the National Student Drama Festival (it is now itinerant) and there I presented it again to passable acclaim from fellow students and thrilling comments from a CBE: “tell that Thom Tuck he’s f-ing good” - Tim West. It was about then that we (myself and the director Charlotte Jarvis, now an accomplished visual artist) decided that we were going to have a Fringe run. It was thrilling: perhaps the first time my mother genuinely believed that I could do this for a living (previous comments include, “It was good, Thomas, but it wasn’t really acting”). We made mistakes of course: we were basically children. Is half ten at night really the correct time for a theatrical monologue at the Fringe? But the highs were undeniable. We had made a good piece of work.

About ten years later, having in the interim done varyingly well in worlds of theatre and comedy, I wondered to myself (not without a tiny splodge of hubris) whether I was ten years better as a performer. Had my experience (Best Newcomer Nominee 2011, five years of shows with The Penny Dreadfuls, Off-West End Theatre, bits of telly and tonnes of radio) made me better able to deliver this dense, lyrical, poetic play? And so, a decade on, I donned once again the red nose and facepaint. I made mistakes of course: I was a thirty-three year old idiot. Is quarter past noon really the correct time if one wants their comedian friends to come and see their show?

I was better and older and, perhaps, a tiny bit wiser. My body ached more and so I had more innate sympathy with the wizened chucklemonger whose life strangely echoes mine. Like him, I spent my formative years traversing the globe and, like him, I discovered a certain facility for making people laugh. And that year, I resolved that I was going to repeat the process. A decade fallow before checking in with the ludicrous clown shoes. Every decade until I’m dead. It sounds like a joke. And, in some ways, it is. But I take my jokes seriously.

This time, before the show, I am going to attempt to do some actual clowning in the street outside the venue - partially to drum up trade, partially to connect more completely with the character. Join me at the yurt near Potterrow Port (a reasonable facsimile of the dressing room of a circus performer) and have a gander at the clown. It’s your last chance until 2035.

It’s at 14:45, which feels very civilised.