“Auntie Empire” at Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Mark Brown on Clydeside
★★★★☆
24 February 2026
Imagine, if you will, a cross between Miriam Margolyes’s gloriously exaggerated playing of Queen Victoria in Blackadder, the late Barry Humphries as his notoriously obscene Australian cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson and Paul Whitehouse’s permanently inebriated raconteur Rowley Birkin QC. If you can conceive of such a hybrid character you are on the way to envisaging Auntie Empire, Julia Taudevin’s marvellously grotesque personification of a colonial Britain that has all but disappeared.
From the outset of this performance in the Tron Theatre’s upstairs studio space The Changing House, Auntie makes it abundantly clear that we the (she assumes, adoring) Scottish public are very lucky indeed that she has deigned to talk to us. Like Margolyes’s Victoria there is a comically sexual dimension to Auntie, which is transferred here from Queen Vic’s famous gillie John Brown to whichever Scotsman Auntie takes a shine to.
As with Whitehouse’s drunken lawyer, her fond reminiscences of a shortbread tin Scotland (all tartan, mountains, grouse shoots and forelock tugging locals) is delivered in a speech that is only occasionally discernible (on account of Auntie’s catastrophic dental health). Indeed, Auntie is in a general state of physical crisis, as we discover in a remarkable one-woman show that takes the “dark clown” comedy of Bouffon to impressively absurd and scatological conclusions.
Auntie interacts comically with her audience, brooking no argument, requiring that we express monarchist sympathies, sing patriotically and, if selected, play the part of a horse on the royal parade ground. Indeed, if you are a very lucky theatre-goer, you might even become the trusted custodian of the Koh-i-Noor diamond (the British “crown jewel” that Auntie believes is her birthright, having been looted from India by the British Empire in 1849).
Despite such colonial hubris, Auntie, like her Empire, is literally falling apart. Her wielding of the map and listing of her former dominions (from India to Nigeria and Australia; she might, topically, also have mentioned Palestine) is bombastic. The truth – as visualized in her hideously manifested excremental incontinence – is that Auntie has no more control over these parts of the world than she has over her own bowels.
The show’s cartoonish scatology and vulgar representations of physical decrepitude are not for the faint-hearted. Taudevin’s performance – which, under the expert guidance of Bouffon director Tim Licata, is a brilliantly sustained, satirical tour de force – makes Humphries’s Les Patterson seem almost sedate.
Auntie Empire boasts garish design (across costume, set and puppets). It has the satirically political spirit of an anti-imperialist Dada production.
The show has completed its current, short tour of Scotland. An acquired taste it may be, but – for lovers of explosive satire and unbridled performance – it deserves a further life.
