Julia Taudevin on creating Auntie Empire: 'a mix of Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and the Queen'

Eventually she concluded that the answer was “no”, for reasons both artistic and environmental. At one point in the process, though, a character popped up in her imagination; an outwardly genial female member of the British ruling class - a mix, originally, of Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, and the late Queen - offering cups of tea and a stream of smiling “posh gobbledegook”, but inwardly rotting away, seething with foul blood and guts.

So Auntie Empire was born, as a by-product of that project; and through a half-decade of other work - including Taudevin’s beautiful pandemic-time beach drama Move, capturing women’s voices of loss, exile and global journeying from Africa and Glasgow to the Hebrides - she resolutely refused to disappear. During lockdown, Auntie became the subject of a short film, made by Taudevin with director Niamh McKeown; she even had a brief post-pandemic incarnation as a stand-up comic, alongside friend and fellow-artist Josie Long.

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Stand-up comedy, through, seemed too wordy for Auntie; and by last year, Taudevin had finally hit on the art-form that seemed right for her - the ancient European physical theatre tradition of the bouffon, the grotesque satirical clown who is not just laughable, but who challenges the audience to laugh at the evils of society, and even of themselves.

Dawn Taylor of Edinburgh’s annual Manipulate Festival, dedicated to visual, physical and object theatre, commissioned a short ten-minute “Snapshot” of Auntie for the 2025 festival. And now - with a creative team that includes her husband, the playwright Kieran Hurley, fellow dramaturg Sara Shaarawi, clown expert Tim Licata, and an outstanding group of designers, puppet makers and sound artists - Taudevin is preparing to present the full 60-minute version of her Auntie Empire show, as part of the Manipulate Festival 2026.

“It’s been quite a journey,” says Taudevin, “and it’s been great, over the past year, to have such strong support and insight from Dawn and the Manipulate team. Bouffon is a form of theatre where the audience plays an absolutely a vital role - they have to sing along, react, respond to the issues and emotions the bouffon character is raising, and that makes it a high risk kind of performance, different at every show.

“But right from the start of my career, back at the Arches in the early 2000s, I’ve always been interested in finding the form to fit the material, whether it’s a more conventional text-based play, or something complete new to me, like Auntie Empire. In terms of the show’s themes, I’m the classic example of the Scot who has seen the experience of colonialism from both sides. My mother is a Gael from Lewis who literally had the Gaelic language beaten out of her as a child; and yet I spent my childhood as part of a very privileged British expat community in Papua New Guinea.

“So I’m very aware of the intense complexities of Britishness, and of Scottish Britishness in particular; and although Auntie Empire speaks in this kind of posh nonsense-speak, actually every syllable of that is scripted. Which is where it is so great to be able to work with Kieran, and later with Sara as co-dramaturg, to make sure the script really works.’’

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Whatever her origins story, though, there’s no doubt that Auntie Empire is taking to the Manipulate stage at a timely moment, given the intense debate around white supremacy and colonial history triggered by the recent rise of far right political movements.

“I sometimes think,” says Kieran Hurley, “that when a figure just emerges in your mind, the way Auntie Empire did for Julia, it sometimes has that quality of being ahead of its time, and only becoming more relevant as the years go by. Now, we have a world stage dominated by a real bouffon figure, a 21st century Ubu Roi; and I do think people need a space in which they can name and laugh at all that, terrifying though it is. We’re hoping this bouffon show will offer that kind of space; at any rate we’ll be giving it a go at Manipulate, and we’ll find out.”

And that’s the kind of spirit of exploration that Dawn Taylor is proud to encourage, as director of Manipulate. “Of our five Scottish-made shows this year,” says Taylor, “I’m really pleased to say that four have emerged from our own development programmes; and that’s a vital part of Manipulate’s work. Auntie Empire is obviously going to be a big event for us, and I’m also thrilled, for example, that Edinburgh-based choreographer Sadiq Ali is back with his new show Tell Me, following the success of The Chosen Haram in 2023.

“And it’s also great to be back with a full international programme this year, including shows from Germany, Italy, Latvia, Norway, and Czechia. Just as one example, I went off to the big visual theatre festival in Charleville last year determined to come back with a really neat little studio show that would fit in a suitcase; and instead I found Wood Paths, from Latvia, an epic show about humanity and our relationship with wood that involves two huge guys swinging axes at giant logs for an hour.

“So the joy of this job is in the sheer range of the work, and the fact that it just surprises me every year, both at the international level, and in the response of theatre-makers based here in Scotland. We’re putting the final touches to this year’s festival in place now; and as always, I’m finding that I just can’t wait to see it all unfold.”

Manipulate 2026, various venues, Edinburgh, from 4-10 February, with performances of Auntie Empire at Summerhall, 8 & 9 February. Auntie Empire is also at the Tron, Glasgow, from 12-14 February.

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