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.