The cute Napoleon - Monster Theatre follows the Emperor from his days as a bed-wetting boy to his destiny as master of Europe
Taking aim at the archetypal over-compensator, perennial fringe favourite Monster Theatre is once again looking through the annals of history for comedy fodder, finding it in Napoleon’s Secret Diary. However, if audiences are expecting a blustery caricature à la Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, a slight perspective adjustment is in order — Ryan Gladstone’s one-man Napoleon is more Leo Tolstoy than Keanu Reeves.
“I got the inspiration from War and Peace,” explains Gladstone. “I read it a couple of years ago and it’s great. Long, but great.”
Based primarily around Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Moscow, War and Peace provided the inspiration for Gladstone’s Napoleon in its view of historical inevitability. Far from seeing leaders as history-shaping monoliths, Tolstoy believed that the solider, able to throw down his bayonet and flee, was the only one truly free to make his own decision. With George W. Bush firmly established as the current generation’s expansionist blunderer, the comparative steps between the French conqueror and the American decider were natural.
“I started thinking about Bush, how everyone hates him pretty much universally,” Gladstone says. “What could he have done differently? He would have had to take action, had to move into Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden. And to everyone he’s so evil, but maybe that’s just the way the cards are laid out. And yes, he is an idiot, but he’s a pawn as well, more so than you or I. I’m not defending him, but I think it’s an interesting way to look at it. Obviously he’s being controlled, he really doesn’t have a choice.”
Instead of beginning with a hand tucked into a uniform and a shrill, nasal scream, the play starts in Corsica with a shy, bed-wetting child (“a cute Napoleon,” says Gladstone, “very sweet and shy”). From his risk-averse youth, Napoleon soon finds himself prodded along the path of fated greatness by the likes of Joan of Arc, Alexander the Great and even George Bush Jr. himself. The result is chronicled in the play’s eponymous diary that weaves Napoleon’s story through a lifetime of military triumphs and defeats — all in the grand comportment of an imperial uniform cobbled together for the fringely sum of $60.
If a contemporary American leader seems to factor heavily into a story about a post-revolutionary Frenchman, it's also worth noting that Monster Theatre’s past successes (The Canada Show, The Big Rock Show) drew their influences from the past. Using American mythology guru Joseph Campbell’s theories on the universality of the hero myth, Gladstone and Monster Theatre see the past as a prime picking ground for "new" stories, the kind that those ignorant of history are destined to repeat.
"(Campbell) discovered the hero myth, and the notion that all mythologies and all religion are telling the same story, but they tell it in relation to their time and place, and we believe that is what a theatre artist’s job is," Gladstone explains. "We take a very direct approach to that, telling the exact same stories and making that relevant to today. Certainly people think they’re creating original stories, but I don’t think so. It’s just telling the same stories in original ways.”
If eight seasons of fringe successes are any indication, the cycle seems to be working for Monster Theatre. Texans and Frenchmen, on the other hand, may still be stuck in the whorl of history.
