Falling to Bloody Bits: Inside Disaster Plan’s Anarchic Auntie Empire

“I put Auntie’s costume on and teeth in and she takes control. It’s a wonderful feeling as a performer to know that you have a character that you can completely trust to go where you would never dream of going on your own.”

For Julia Taudevin, the multi-award-winning playwright and performer, this act of possession is the engine behind Auntie Empire.

Premièring at this year’s Manipulate Festival before touring to Glasgow (but with previews in Ayr, New Galloway and Dundee), the show—a collaboration with long-time creative partner Kieran Hurley—marks a violent shift for Disaster Plan. Gone are the sonic worlds of Beats or the dystopian prophecy of Heads Up. In their place is a bouffon nightmare: a tartan-clad, crumbling personification of imperial self-regard who demands we look at the mess we’ve made, right before she makes a bigger one on stage.

On the surface, it looks like an exercise in chaos. But as is typical for Taudevin and Hurley, there is a rigorous architecture beneath the madness.

The Disaster Plan Ethos

To understand the creature, one must understand the company. Disaster Plan exists to formalise a long-standing creative habit between the two artists.

“Before Disaster Plan, we worked together a lot, and often that took the shape of performing a supportive creative role in each other’s solo shows,” Hurley explains. “Julia co-directed Beats and Heads Up… and I did some dramaturgical work on Blow Off, for example.”

The company was established not just to continue this, but to “hold out a space for work that was perhaps more off-the-wall than what we might look to get made through other channels.” The mandate is simple: chase the ideas that feel challenging or not fully understood yet. Importantly, Hurley stresses, “We’re always focused on audiences so that’s never about being navel-gazing, but it does mean entering into something where you might be taking a big leap, and really asking ‘what does this idea really want to be?’”

From the Beaches to the Bouffon

That question—“what does this idea want to be?”—has led them to some wildly different answers. Their previous flagship production, Move, was an “epic beach opera” performed on the sands of the Isle of Lewis, shaped by the wind, the sea, and the open geography of the Hebrides.

“I put Auntie’s costume on and teeth in and she takes control. It’s a wonderful feeling as a performer to know that you have a character that you can completely trust to go where you would never dream of going on your own.”

Julia Taudevin

“The show closed the day before lockdown officially lifted (!) and then toured to 12 of Scotland’s most remote and beautiful beaches,” Taudevin recalls.

The jump from the fresh, open air of the Atlantic to the claustrophobic, sweaty intimacy of a bouffon performance is stark. Yet Taudevin suggests the shift wasn’t a conscious rebellion against their past, but a necessary surrender to the subject matter.

“With Auntie Empire we knew we had to find the right form for it,” she says. “Though I am not an expert in Bouffon, being a fan of plays like Ubu Roi, I had always an instinct that bouffon might be the right form.”

Referencing Alfred Jarry’s surrealist masterpiece Ubu Roi signals a specific lineage of anarchic, grotesque theatre that refuses to behave. It is a form that fits a nation in decline. But getting Auntie to this point of refined chaos was a non-linear journey involving a surprising mix of influences.

The Evolution of a Monster

The creature began life in a Summerhall lab in 2019, conceived as a vessel to explore “live gore effects in a naturalistic way.”

“The character was far more naturalistic then,” Taudevin reflects. “Although it was hugely successful as a 10-minute scratch, it was expensive, time consuming and messy and ultimately very difficult to see how it could evolve into a sustainable theatre show that could be repeated night upon night.”

That practical reality birthed a short film, co-directed with Niamh McKeown, which allowed the team to control the gaze and perfect the prosthetics in the edit. “The film packs a powerful punch because of its realism and there was a moment when I could have finished my journey with the character there,” Taudevin admits.

But the creature refused to stay on screen. Taudevin spent time as an IASH Creative Fellow experimenting with the character in traditional play structures, and even took Auntie to the comedy circuit.

“I… played around with her as a stand up with support from my pal the comedienne Josie Long,” Taudevin reveals. This DNA is crucial. It ensures that Auntie Empire isn’t just “theatre about politics,” but a show with the rhythmic bones of a stand-up set—albeit one performed by a disintegrating monster.

“Bouffon is an expressly political art form that ridicules the powerful and is inherently surrealist which feels entirely right for the live show,” she says. “And Bouffon also activates the audience… This makes every show completely different and is what feeds the anarchy of the show.”

The Art of the ‘Helpfully Vague’

Structuring this anarchy requires a different kind of collaboration. For Hurley, usually the architect of the text in his own solo work, the project demanded a step back. His role here is listed as dramaturg, a title he views with some amusement.

“You’re right, it is a nebulous term! Here, quite helpfully so,” Hurley admits. “It’s not my play, and I’m necessarily on the outside of things – that’s fine! There is rigour to the dramaturgy of the show… but that’s mostly work Julia has done.”

This looseness allows the show to prioritize the visual gag and the visceral moment over the written word. It transforms the role of the creative team from hierarchical oversight to a collective effort.

“We have quite a large, collaborative team, and while Julia is very much the leader at the centre of that, a lot of it has taken shape through sharing work… and having people chip in on their thoughts,” Hurley says. “It’s such a ‘live’ form… that you really need people responding to it to know what is.”

This approach extends to what Hurley calls “the Avengers” of the production—a team of co-conspirators including bouffon director Tim Licata and designer Fergus Dunnet. “The company’s job is then to ask… who are the co-conspirators, who are the Avengers we need to assemble to deliver a brilliant show,” he adds.

No More Essays

The ultimate goal of this squad is to confront the “Death of Empire”—a well-trodden trope in Scottish theatre, but one often handled with kid gloves or academic distance. Auntie Empire has no interest in either.

“You’re also not writing an essay you know?” Hurley says.

He is keen to point out that this isn’t a critique of previous theatrical attempts to tackle the subject. “We’re certainly not saying that other attempts to tackle similar themes through different forms have somehow uniformly failed – rather that we think this might also be an interesting way to do it,” Hurley clarifies. “The bouffon is appealing to us here because it takes no prisoners. It’s form that is slippery, shifty, and refuses to let anyone off the hook.”

Refusing to let the audience off the hook is the show’s engine. Liberal arts audiences are well-versed in nodding along to critiques of colonialism, safely insulated by their own awareness. Bouffon strips that safety away.

“The show does that in such a way that allows the audience, who undoubtedly will be made up of a majority of liberal arts goers – to laugh and distance themselves from those repugnant structures and individuals,” Taudevin explains. “But Auntie goes a step further and skewers its audience on its satirical sword by asking us to consider how almost every aspect of our daily lives in contemporary capitalist Britain is built on the exploitations and brutality of the Empire.”

Crucially, the show does not offer a solution. “As a show it doesn’t seek to answer the ethical problem inherent in that but by implicating the audience through fun, active participation, it poses the questions about what audiences are willing to do about rectifying it, if anything,” she adds.

Visceral Rigorous Stupidity

It sounds grueling—a relentless confrontation with historical guilt delivered by a woman covered in gore. But Taudevin insists that the act of creation offers a counter-weight to the heaviness of the subject matter.

“We’re always focused on audiences so that’s never about being navel-gazing, but it does mean entering into something where you might be taking a big leap, and really asking ‘what does this idea really want to be?’”

Kieran Hurley

“It is a rare privilege to be able to make political satire and that is intensely energising and hopeful,” she says.

That energy will be necessary. Inside the prosthetics, beneath the layers of a crumbling Britannia, the performance becomes an act of physical endurance.

“I mean, yes, it is exhausting and sweaty but it is brilliant fun because it is visceral and rigorous and very, very silly,” she says. “It has also been so exhilarating working with Tim and the wider team to find a shared clarity of vision over what the show is doing and saying politically.”

The result promises to be a riotous, anarchic piss-take that leaves the stage—and the audience’s psyche—stained. While the promotional materials warn of a character “falling to bloody bits”, Taudevin offers a small mercy regarding the post-show cleanup. Thanks to the design team, “the only fluid I’ll need to mop up is my own sweat.”

She pauses, then adds with the glint of the grotesque that defines the show:

“Or at least as a perimenopausal woman who has twice given birth vaginally I l hope that’s the only fluid I’ll need to mop up. And if that is too much information for you then wait until you meet Auntie!”

Featured Image: Lead Image – Auntie Empire – Julia Taudevin – Credit Brian Hartley