Anyone who's seen Heath Ledger's performance of the Joker knows that clowns are the stuff of nightmares. Why? Because they never stop smiling. We are both fascinated and repulsed by clowns, for who could look at a world as dark and damaged as ours, and do nothing but grin? This is what makes the plight of Grinpayne in The Grinning Man so ripe for theatrical exploitation. In a dark, dystopic London of the past, audiences escape their miserable lives by laughing at the face of a freakish boy, whose features were contorted into an eternal grin by an enemy he never knew. In the jaunty, grating and horribly memorable opening number, Laughter is the best medicine, we are reminded that the only way to forget the monsters in our heads is by 'rubber-necking some other bugger's grief.' Which is essentially what audiences at Trafalgar Studios are doing eight times a week, at the highly-acclaimed transfer of the Bristol Old Vic production.

The show-within-a-show format expertly blurs the lines between the emotions of those on stage and those in the audience. In the world of the story, spectators burst into fits of gleeful laughter at the sight of Grinpayne. They are both delighted and troubled by him: for though he has the face of a monster, there is 'heaven in his eyes'. His terrible affliction makes them forget their own troubles and allows them to share in his. 'And then with sudden clarity you are him and he is you, and then you see that all the people round you feel it too' sing the chorus. Looking around myself, it was clear that the real-life audience were definitely all "feeling it", many of them on their third or fourth visit. I had heard people chatting before curtain up about how much they loved the musical, how it made them laugh and cry. So what is it about this macabre, twisted, faintly grotesque musical that had them shaking with anticipation?

To be clear, the stage is set for horror: the proscenium arch transformed into a wide, gaping mouth; the costumes ripped, mismatched and generally filthy-looking. Tim Phillips and Mark Teitler's music has a creepy, organ-grinder edge, with many a shrieking, discordant moment. Julian Bleach's Barkilphedro, the resident jester and malcontent, slithers around the stage, dripping with disdain, his voice as soft and inviting as a mouthful of gravel. Elsewhere there's incest, disfigurement, torture, opiate addiction and a healthy use of expletives. 42nd Street it ain't.


And yet, The Grinning Man is unquestionably beautiful. Spectators at the seedy Trafalgar Fair, we learn of Grinpayne's tale through exquisite puppetry from War Horse's Gyre & Gimble. His mother lost at sea, the boy Grinpayne is left wandering the woods, when he finds a blind baby girl. He saves the child's life and comes upon a man named Ursus (an earnest, husky-voiced Sean Kingsley), who promises to look after them. Grinpayne and the girl, Dea, grow up together, and ultimately fall in love: a touching romance between two damaged children who cling to one another to survive. Now a young man, Grinpayne performs in a freak show, earning money to grant him and his family passage to another country. But he is haunted by his past, and swears to take his revenge on the man who disfigured him. Louis Maskell's performance in the title role is superb, he portrays Grinpayne's internal conflict with enormous pathos and sensitivity, which is all the more impressive given that his face is almost always covered by a mask. He moves about the stage as deftly as a shadow, his voice nothing short of spine-chilling. The pain of his injury threatens to overwhelm him, and is kept in check by a mysteriously potent medicine made by Ursus. Meanwhile, in the royal palace of Catford, sex-crazy Princess Josiana (a striking performance from Amanda Wilkin) is sent into fits of orgasmic pleasure at the sight of Grinpayne, who seems to embody the notion of 'pure feeling' that she has been searching for. Grinpayne's face makes him a celebrity, and, seated among the nobility, he must choose between living a life of ease and facing his demons.

Taking inspiration from Victor Hugo's L'homme qui rit, writer Carl Grose weaves a narrative that is part fairytale, part coming-of-age story, part horror show and part comedy. It may not look like your average, laugh-a-minute musical, but the jokes come thick and fast (top marks for Barkilphedros mid-number exclamation "I hate this pissing song!") and the audience just lap it up. But despite the humour, the fiendishly clever lyrics (a collaboration between Grose, director Tom Morris and the composers) prove that this is more than a fairy story on LSD. Act Two is a rollercoaster of emotion, and Morris pulls no punches in his exposure of human suffering.

Photo: Helen Maybanks via Facebook.com

Pain is woven into the very fabric of the story: grief, injury, heartbreak and injustice are at its core. Even without Grinpayne's eternal smile, The Grinning Man is suffused with nightmarish potential, showing us a world of decadence, driven by greed, in which innocent children are cruelly punished. Everyone on stage is lost: in the hypnotic solo, Labyrinth, Grinpayne questions whether he is nothing more than the mask he wears or whether his true self has been concealed beneath his scars. Rather than facing the demons that haunt him, he turns to the crimson leaf potion to drown the sorrow. The situation is desperate and painly relevant for a modern audience. Yet in Dea, the steadfast, moral core of the piece (played beautifully by Sanne Den Besten) Morris offers audiences a message of hope.
She may be blind, but Dea sees with more clarity that anyone. Grinpayne wants to run from pain, but Dea shows him that terror must be faced and embraced in order to move on. She demonstrates that neither revenge nor numbness can protect us from past suffering: they simply make us more lost. We may be 'shattered children' who were 'born broken', but Dea believes that our scars do not define us, they are merely part of us. It is love that gives us strength, and helps us find the courage to keep going.

The Grinning Man plays at Trafalgar Studios 1 until 5 May. You can find tickets on the official website.

Clodagh McKenna might just be one of the happiest people I’ve ever met. A bundle of enthusiasm, the queen of 'Irish soul food’ has a smile as sunny as her yellow blouse, her lilting voice frequently bursting into peals of excited laughter. And it seems she has plenty to be pleased about: her new recipe column in the Evening Standard is the latest of a string of successes in her twenty-year career in food. An alumna of the Ballymaloe Cookery School & House in County Cork, Clodagh started out by running farmers’ markets in Ireland, before penning five cookbooks, opening a restaurant, hosting numerous pop-ups and appearing on television across the world.

Her food is simple, seasonal and always stylish, presented with seemingly effortless grace. She passionately advocates eating with the seasons, for the sake of our health, the environment and our palates. So it is no surprise that the natural world is ever present in Clodagh’s food and styling: her home and kitchen are filled with wildflowers and bunches of dried leaves, her dishes elegantly garnished with petals and crushed herbs. Her unbridled joy at cooking with fresh ingredients is evident from the merest glimpse at any of her recipe videos: she handles every garden vegetable as though it were the finest saffron, inhaling the scent of a bunch of parsley as she might a Valentine’s bouquet. Her excitement is infectious.


As the US ambassador for Kerrygold, Clodagh spends much of her time in America, becoming the face of Irish food stateside, introducing television audiences to modern cuisine from the Emerald Isle. Despite a gruelling schedule that sees her splitting her time between London, Dublin, New York and Toronto, Clodagh insists she loves nothing more than having guests over for supper at home. ‘My heart fills with joy when I see everyone sat around my table enjoying my food’, she says.

These simple-yet-sophisticated meals, filled with the bounty of the season, have formed the basis of Clodagh’s latest cookbook and television series, Clodagh’s Suppers, which will be released in autumn 2018. In between her monthly transatlantic journeys, I met with Clodagh to learn about her food story and the ingredients for a perfect supper.


Can you summarise a supper at Clodagh's?

Cooking for people is one of my favourite things: it's how I socialise. I make everything: down to the syrup for the cocktail guests receive when they arrive. The menu is always based on seasonal ingredients, some of which are local and foraged. I cook everything personally; there isn’t a chef downstairs while I’m upstairs hosting.

So how do you go about planning them?

The first thing I do for the menu is to look at what’s in season and what I’ve been cooking for myself at home. I try to pick dishes that really sing of that particular time of the year, so, in autumn it would be apples, blackberries, figs or perhaps wild mushrooms. Then there’s the logistics of finding all the best producers. I always try and get one producer from Ireland, the rest I find locally; the best butchers, grocers and fishmongers in my area.



If people want to organise supper clubs themselves, what advice would you give them?

I would say, start off by making dinners for your friends, and organise them really well. You will always be stressed if you haven’t planned well enough. So, start by working out how many people you’re going to invite. Work back from there and plan the menu, your shopping lists and the tableware you’re going to use for each dish. Then organise your menu so that there is one course that needs your immediate attention before serving, and make the other two things that can be prepared beforehand and served straight away. If you do too many “stand-over” dishes then you’re not going to be able to do a good job. So only pick one that will require your attention for twenty minutes straight.