At Summerhall, as part of the Manipulate Festival, Julia Taudevin’s Auntie Empire is a show that improves as it decays.
Performed solo by Taudevin, who also conceived the work, the production opens in a register of playful provocation, leaning heavily on audience participation. Under the guidance of performance director Tim Licata, these early sections clearly aim to implicate the room, drawing the audience into complicity before pulling the rug, but the results are mixed. Some exchanges feel laboured, stretching jokes past their natural lifespan and slightly blunting the edge of the satire. At times, the structure seems more interested in keeping the audience busy than in advancing the analysis.
Once the show pivots away from participation and into its more overtly theatrical language, however, Auntie Empire comes sharply into focus. A central puppet sequence, devised with puppetry effects designer Fergus Dunnet and costume and puppetry maker Gretchen Maynard-Hahn, charts the uneasy union of the Scottish and English nations, the birth of the British Empire, and the violent, farcical expansion of the Commonwealth. Here, grotesque humour does real analytical work, puppets rutting their way across the globe becomes an uncomfortably effective metaphor for conquest, domination and entitlement.
From this point on, the production grows darker, stranger and more assured. Taudevin’s Auntie, a decaying, grotesque Britannia figure, quite literally begins to fall apart. The visual world, shaped by set designer Fraser Lappin, lighting designer Emma Jones, and sound designers Niroshini Thambar and Nik Paget-Tomlinson, steadily thickens with smoke, noise and bodily disintegration. What begins lightly becomes increasingly oppressive, and the accumulating prosthetics and effects come to read as symbols of war, domination and historical rot.
The show’s final movement lands some of its most telling blows. When Auntie declares that “the world has changed, they see everything,” it feels like a quiet admission that the old Punch and Judy theatrics of empire no longer function. Nothing can be hidden behind the booth curtain anymore. A subsequent attempt at repair collapses when she simply cannot bring herself to apologise, a refusal that feels pointedly contemporary, lampooning public figures who catalogue their “achievements” rather than reckon with the damage done.
That list, railways, the British Library, Marks & Spencer, BAE Systems, Trident, is grimly funny, precisely because it mistakes infrastructure and consumer comfort for moral credit. The closing blast of a well-known, once-banned Sex Pistols track seals the show’s mood, defiant, accusatory, and knowingly abrasive.
Auntie Empire is not without its flaws. The opening sections could be tighter, and less reliant on prolonged audience interaction. But as the night wears on, the piece finds its teeth. What emerges is a work that is strongest when it trusts theatrical imagery over participation, and grotesque embodiment over coaxed consent, a show that sharpens as it decomposes
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 9th February 2026
North West End UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr