A new play by Sue Curtis, in collaboration with Jon Monie — world premiere at the Bath Comedy Festival 2024.
Most theatre-lovers and pantomime fans have heard the name Grimaldi. Most can even picture him: the white-faced, red-cheeked clown at the root of every pantomime that has followed. But hardly anyone knows the man behind the make-up — a life every bit as full of darkness as it was of laughter.
Slapstick! sets out to change that. Written by Sue Curtis in collaboration with Bath’s own pantomime favourite Jon Monie — the pair developing it through the long quiet of lockdown — the play received its world premiere at the Bath Comedy Festival 2024, running for seven performances at the atmospheric Old Theatre Royal in April.
One clown, two actors and two very hungover musicians
The conceit is gloriously simple. Grimaldi is about to give the final performance of his life, ready at last to tell the audience his own story. Then disaster strikes: the rest of the company is waylaid by highwaymen on the road to the theatre, and the great clown is left with only a panic-stricken stage manager and two musicians — still recovering from a riotous night before — to conjure every character his life ever contained.
What follows is quick-change chaos: costumes, puppets, sleight of hand, songs of the period and the clown’s own words, all pressed into service to tell a story that lurches from the bawdy to the heartbreaking and back again. And the astonishing part? As Sue Curtis is at pains to point out, not a single fact in it is invented. The cruelty of Grimaldi’s father, the childhood injuries, the loss of his first wife and their baby, the reckless stage stunts that eventually left him unable to walk without crutches — all true.
Born in London in 1778 into a family of Italian entertainers, Joseph Grimaldi became the superstar of the Regency stage — the performer who effectively invented the clown as we know it, whose rapport with the crowd offered a raucous antidote to the stiff Shakespearean actors of the day. But fame came at a price, and Slapstick! refuses to look away from it. This is a comedy about tragedy, and a tragedy stuffed with jokes.
The company
Slapstick! is brought to life by a quartet of Bath’s most inventive theatrical talent, working seamlessly together in the round.
Sue Curtis — writer, director & producer
A writer, librettist and director with a lifetime in theatre and education behind her, Sue trained as an actor at Mountview before a long academic career lecturing across South Africa, Austria and England. At King Edward’s School in Bath she founded the Drama Department and ran it for two decades. Slapstick! is the latest chapter in her celebrated writing partnership with Jools Scott — the pair behind the First World War oratorio The Cool Web (premiered at Bath Abbey) and a string of works for the children’s charity Voices for Life.
Jon Monie — as Joseph Grimaldi
Known to Bath audiences as “Mr Pantomime,” Jon has clocked up more than twenty Christmas seasons and over a thousand performances at the Theatre Royal Bath, where he writes as well as stars in the annual panto — his Beauty and the Beast won Best Script at the Great British Pantomime Awards. On screen he has popped up in Bridgerton, The Outlaws, The Nevers and Showtrial. As Grimaldi he shows a side well beyond the knockabout: the reviews singled out his moments of pathos, rage and vulnerability as a genuine revelation.
Nik Howden — as the Stage Manager
A wonderfully versatile actor whose screen credits include Doctor Who (the much-loved “Vincent and the Doctor”), Ashes to Ashes and Grandpa in My Pocket, and who has toured his own acclaimed one-man show Stan, playing Stan Laurel. In Slapstick! he plays the beleaguered Stage Manager — and, by necessity, a bewildering parade of everyone else, swinging from high farce to raw trauma at the drop of a hat.
Jools Scott — composer & actor-musician
Composer of the play’s original music and one of its two on-stage musicians. A choral scholar at St Paul’s Cathedral who went on to study composition at the Royal Academy of Music, Jools writes across choral music, film, opera and musical theatre, with collaborators including Aardman, the National Theatre, Netflix, the BFI and the Philharmonia Orchestra. His long-running writing partnership with Sue Curtis stretches back years — Slapstick! brings that collaboration to the comic stage.
Harry Miller — actor-musician
A multi-instrumentalist, actor and composer who completes the on-stage band. Harry has worked as an actor-musician on the National Theatre’s Peter Pan, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the Bridge Theatre and The Colour of Dinosaurs at Bristol Old Vic, among others. Alongside Jools, he provides the play’s live score — the two of them acting as a kind of Greek chorus, singing and playing a running commentary on Grimaldi’s rise and fall.
What the critics said
Reviewing the premiere for the Bath Echo, Steve Huggins warned audiences that, for all its jokes, this is a show unafraid of the profound darkness in Grimaldi’s story — a production that flips from light to tragedy at a switch, mirroring the double life that shadows so many comedians. He praised Jon Monie’s turn as a genuine powerhouse performance, all the more striking for its believability, and admired how the cast of four locked together on the simple in-the-round stage.
Expect to be amused, of course — but be prepared to be saddened and moved as well. — Bath Echo, on the premiere of Slapstick!
It’s a fitting verdict for a play that captures both the birth of the modern clown and the very real cost paid by the man who created him. Slapstick! is a laugh-out-loud evening with tears never far behind — exactly as Joseph Grimaldi himself might have wanted it.