Context
In an interview with Alan Titchmarsh, Judi Dench, who performed the role of Desirée in London, commented on the context of the song. The play is "a dark play about people who, at the beginning, are with wrong partners and in the end it is hopefully going to become right, and she (Desiree) mistimes her life in a way and realizes when she re-meets the man she had an affair with and had a child by (though he does not know that), that she loves him and he is the man she wants."
Some years before the play begins, Desirée was a young, attractive actress, whose passions were the theater and men. She lived her life dramatically, flitting from man to man. Fredrik was one of her many lovers and fell deeply in love with Desirée, but she declined to marry him. The play implies that when they parted Desirée may have been pregnant with his child.
A few months before the play begins, Fredrik married a beautiful woman who at 18 years old was much younger than he. In Act One, Fredrik meets Desirée again, and is introduced to her daughter, a precocious adolescent suggestively named Fredrika. Fredrik explains to Desirée that he is now married to the young woman, whom he loves, but who is still a virgin and refuses to have sex with him. Desirée and Fredrik then make love.
Act Two begins days later, and Desirée realizes that she truly loves Fredrik. She tells Fredrik that he needs to be rescued from his marriage, and she proposes to him. Fredrik explains to Desirée that he has been swept off the ground and is "in the air" in love with his beautiful, young wife, and apologizes for having misled her. Fredrik walks across the room, while Desirée remains sitting on the bed; as she feels both intense sadness and anger, at herself, her life and her choices, she sings, "Send in the Clowns." Not long thereafter, Fredrik's young wife runs away with his son, and he is free to accept Desirée's proposal, and the song is reprised as a coda.
Read more about this topic: Send In The Clowns
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