A British flag is burning. Okay, a comically tiny one, all of four inches long. But Napoleon still gleefully warms his hands on its flames. This mix of whimsy and mild subversion is typical of Told By An Idiot's exploration of the last years of the legendary general's life. 'Napoleon Disrobed' is an adaptation of Simon Leys' novel, an exercise in alternative history that puts the old emperor in a lot of new clothes.
He escapes St Helena by dressing up as a cabin boy, and persuading a comically inappropriate doppelganger to take his place. But his hopes of returning to Paris and staging a glorious revolution fall flat. Instead, he ends up in limbo: taken in by a lonely widow, selling melons, unable to convince anyone who he really is.
It's light on actual incidents, but Kathryn Hunter's production fills this void with joyfully physical silliness. A lot of the humour comes from the surreal slipperiness between fiction and reality in a world where nothing is as it seems. A melon bounces like a basketball, then smashes into a mush of red fruit. Michael Vale's wonderfully designed set is constantly tossing and pitching like a ship's deck, taking scenes to the brink of lethal-looking chaos - especially a brilliant sequence where Napoleon cooks eggs for the captain in a literal storm.
Paul Hunter (who plays Napoleon) and Ayesha Antoine (who plays everyone else) are a memorable double act. He's child-like, then sunk in thought, then lost in eye-popping fury. She's a master of transformation, seeming to swap bodies as well as accents as she becomes a hotel receptionist, a conning tramp, a doctor, a baby, and finally, a woman in unrequited love with this lost man.
'Napoleon Disrobed' ends with convincing pathos, a portrait of a man melting away without his stiff military uniform and hat to hold him up. But some of the emotional weight of his story gets lost in the production's constantly jocular tone - as does the darker side of his urge to plunder and conquer. A 'University Challenge'-style opening sequence feels like a particular mis-step, subtly cementing this production's appeal to a university-educated, middle class audience. Napoleon might be disrobed, but flag-burning aside, this production doesn't quite reveal its hero's true colours.
