In his last days, the former emperor is surrounded by characters hell-bent on reminding him of his failures
After causing the deaths of an estimated 3-6 million people during the Napoleonic Wars, the erstwhile emperor is sulking on the extremely remote island of St. Helena in the middle of the South Atlantic. The only ones around are his chef, a teenage girl named Betsy … and a bee.
That’s the setup of Buntport Theater’s new comedy The Death of Napoleon: A Play in Less Than Three Acts. Staged in the round, the set consists of a patch of sand with a wooden seesaw in the middle and a flagpole with a variety of different flags meant to telegraph Napoleon’s mood.
Napoleon died on St. Helena in May of 1821 at age 51, and he really did have a seesaw upon which to “exercise” in his final year. He did also enjoy the company of a 13-year-old girl named Betsy Balcombe who lived on the island, and bees were a symbol of his reign. Beyond that, the rest is pure Buntport doing what it does best.
Brian Colonna plays Napoleon as a sniveling weenie, his hugely diminished station exacerbated by the illness that precedes his death and the unfortunate fact that his right hand has been transformed into a piece of focaccia (explaining why he’s got his hand tucked into his coat in so many portraits).
(Check out this great Vox video about the hand-in-the-coat thing and how it was by no means just a Napoleon pose.)
Not one to take such a deformity lying down, he keeps his chef (Erik Edborg) hopping to come up with some way to transform the bread back into a hand. The chef, for his part, makes clear on multiple occasions that bread, once baked, pretty much is what it is.
Playing Betsy, Erin Rollman is a stitch as she flits around the crazy Corsican trying to get him out of his slump but taking every opportunity to deliver zingers about his situation and recent failings on the battlefield. Napoleon for his part calls the disastrous Russia campaign — where he lost an estimated 380,000 soldiers — a “draw” since it was really the weather that caused all the problems — not his fault!
As for The Bee: You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen Hannah Duggan stuffed into a cutesy bee outfit complete with antennae, wings and stinger. Almost always playing the bull-in-the-china-shop, Duggan’s character epitomizes what we’d all like to say to every one of these stupid, power-hungry men over the ages, from Alexander to Trump, who cause so much death and destruction in service to their own egos. Napoleon deserves every moment of discomfort and unhappiness he’s enduring on St. Helena, and it somehow feels right to have a giant female bee buzzing around reminding him what a terrible person he is.
And she does, at one point, even sting him, leading to the funniest bit in the show as Duggan’s bee gives a spirited, self-nauseating science lesson about what happens to honeybees when they use their stinger and then die leaving behind part of their digestive tract.
As the Bunportians told Westword, some of the inspiration for this play came from the pandemic, where the theme of isolation was ever-present. But even as the troupe mines every laugh possible from the story, there’s a seriousness to the idea that even when we think the Napoleons of the world are a thing of the past, there’s always another Putin waiting in the wings to remind us that power-mad assholes will always be with us. In that sense, it’s cathartic to see Napoleon wither away on St. Helena — even being mocked by the other three characters with a bastardized version of Abba’s “Waterloo” to rub more salt in his wounds.
The main point, as it always is with Buntport, is to be funny, and Napoleon has plenty of laughs. While the other three play their characters big and broad, Colonna’s Napoleon has a wealth of great lines about his circumstance that he delivers as muttered asides — seeming to know that none of the others will give a damn or sympathize with him.
As is so often the case with Buntport, the audience spends a fair amount of time not 100 percent sure what’s going on but nonetheless happy to be along for the ride. For their 51st original production, Team Buntport is as fresh as ever, delivering another rollicking, wholly original comedy that’s sure to put a smile on your face — alongside a look of puzzled bewilderment.
-Alex Miller, January 29, 2023, Onstage Colorado