Joey Grimaldi, the greatest clown of the 19th century, made his debut at the age of four in The Triumph of Mirth. The triumph was hard-won. His father, a fine and original clown himself, was a monster Dickens would have been proud to have invented, a savage brute (known as the Signor, but more generally referred to as Grim-All-Day) whose idea of training children for the theatre was to put them in the stocks or suspend them in a cage 40ft above the stage. He routinely beat his wife and terrified the household with his obsession with his own death. The devil had informed him in a dream that he would die on the first Friday of the month, whereafter the Signor kept vigil on that day, every month, in a room filled with clocks, gibbering till dawn. His favourite reading was The Uncertainty of Signs of Death; his dread of being buried alive led him to stipulate in his will that when he died his children should sever his head from his body, a task duly performed by his daughter, who kept a hand on the saw worked by the surgeon hired for the purpose.
Anyone who could survive Grim-All-Day could survive anything, you might think. Andrew McConnell Stott, in this great big Christmas pudding of a book, almost over-stuffed with rich and colourful life, notes the cost to Joey of his upbringing, but also observes that it was at the core of his work. If you wanted to breed a clown, the Signor was perhaps the perfect parent, whose "arbitrary justice and irrationality had led him to understand the world as a shifting plane of ambiguities, void of the anchors of reason and authority a parent conventionally provides". Well, yes, but was he funny? The answer, for his contemporaries, was ear-splittingly in the affirmative. He was so irresistibly comic "as to put dullness to flight and make a saint laugh," said one. "His acting and manner leave all competition at a very humble distance." The appeal was across the board: the famously severe lord chancellor Lord Eldon remarked that "never, never, did I see a leg of mutton stolen with such superhumanly sublime impudence as by that man" – impressive expert evidence.
His first great triumph was Mother Goose, with which, in true theatrical tradition, he saved a failing season by reinventing a moribund genre: pantomime. In one of the set-pieces at which he excels, Stott recreates it: a non-stop variety show of surreal brilliance, in which live ducks flew out of pies, chairs and tables hovered 8ft in the air, huge balconies suddenly disappeared, hats turned into bells that started to chime, bottles became buzzing beehives. In one climactic sequence, the Vauxhall pleasure gardens were created on stage in all their opulent beauty, only for this vision of loveliness to be rudely disrupted by Joey starting a serenade on a tin fish kettle. He gets all the gentlefolk up on their feet to dance a crude sort of hoe-down, whips off the tablecloths and juggles the crockery. "Waiters charge frantically from side to side, as plates smash and live birds splutter skywards from beneath the dinner platters, confusion that increases its speed and intensity until it reaches a crescendo of pandemonium" – at which point a cheesemonger steps forward and explains that he's the set designer; he is duly – and rightly – applauded to the rafters. It was clearly an early 19th-century Hellzapoppin', mad, inventive and, in that final touch, almost postmodern. The last line of Stott's book is "you had to be there", and in passages such as these, he makes you feel you were.
The centre of it all was Joey, the Lord of Misrule. Stott gives a fine description of how, after long years of apprenticeship, Grimaldi created the figure who was, he says, one of the most significant theatrical developments of the 19th century. First the costume: bold patterns, vivid colours and "a kaleidoscopic medley of circles, stripes and hoops . . . the costume of a 'great lubberly loutish boy'". Then the face, a startling mask: "a blood-red wound, a mile-wide smear of jam, to form the gaping, gluttonous cavern of a mouth", eyes ringed round and arched with thick brows, cheeks daubed with red chevrons, topped with a bizarre pyramid of wigs: red mohicans, blue plumes, and orange and green thistle – "half plumber's plunger, half fox's brush". Then gloves and slippers, so that by the end, not a millimetre of flesh was visible: it was a total transformation.
Grimaldi's contemporaries were instantly entranced by this "part-child, part-nightmare", Stott writes. "A countenance," said one, "that is a whole pantomime in itself." The mask obviously released Grimaldi physically into hyper-expressiveness: "a thousand odd twitches and unaccountable absurdities oozed out of every pore." Each eye "carried on without the aid of the other"; his "oven-mouth" had a never-ending power of extension, his chin touching the buttons of his waistcoat; even his nose was "a vivacious excrescence, capable of exhibiting disdain, fear, anger and even joy". The impression, according to one commentator, was of "a grown child, waking to perception, but wondering at every object he beholds". Stott calls it a retreat to childhood, after the shattering blow of the double loss of wife and baby son in childbirth: "every aspect of his Clown, from his manic energy and schoolboy clothes, to his insatiable appetite for sausages and larcenous will, was suggestive of pre-adolescent desire." Possibly; or possibly it is an assertion of innocence, native desire unmediated by morality or manners, like Papageno in The Magic Flute, which sits so clearly in this tradition. It certainly released unbridled delight in its audience. It cost him dear, physically.
The extraordinary demands he made of his body as he devised ever more extravagant business took a terrible toll, occasionally compounded by the state of warfare that existed between management and stage-hands, who would occasionally "forget" to secure a trap door, sending him plunging 20ft below the stage. He found it increasingly difficult to move: masseurs were standing by in the wings to ease muscles gathered up into huge knots.
Finally, at the age of 43, he was diagnosed with "premature old age". In the second of two rather redundant introductions which create something of a false start to the book, Stott tells us that he himself has endured bouts of depression; it is this, one presumes, that leads him to emphasise the melancholy in Grimaldi's temperament, seeing him as the prototype of all sad clowns, a proposition not entirely proven in the book. If there is an archetype to be found in Joey Grimaldi, it is here, in the image of the artist who destroys his body in the cause of his art: Merce Cunningham, Rudolf Nureyev, Laurence Olivier. His son took over his roles, but the hugely gifted boy, desperately mollycoddled – no doubt as a reaction to Joey's own upbringing – abandoned himself to drink and high living, and died, possibly poisoned, at the age of 30, the last of the Grimaldi dynasty of clowns.
Stott brings him to vivid life, as he does his vile old grandfather. Joey, in many ways a man out of his times – sober, decent, uxorious, professional to a fault – is harder to resurrect; sometimes the foreground is swamped by the background. But what a background! Stott's pages are bursting with the unruly and madcap theatre of the late 1700s and early 1800s: aquadramas, reindeer shows, infant prodigies; the young Edmund Kean as a child actor terrifying audiences and actors alike at the head of a band of feral juveniles; the saturnine figure of John Philip Kemble, opium-crazed and vengeful; Sheridan in a pub calmly watching his Drury Lane Theatre go up in flames and murmuring "a man may surely enjoy a glass of wine by his own fireside". Stott's pages close sombrely with the inexorable advance of Victorian propriety and middle-class morality. How one longs to have seen Grimaldi's theatre. And how grateful one is not to have been a performer in it.
Simon Callow is appearing at the Riverside Studios, London, in Dr Marigold and Mr Chops, two one-man plays by Charles Dickens.
