EDINBURGH 2026: Review: ED GAUGHAN: THE EMPEROR, Just The Tonic At The Caves
A new standup show from accomplished voice actor and Brassic star Ed Gaughan
Ed Gaughan is extremely good at accents. So good that it’s five minutes or so into the show before anyone realises his native accent is not, in fact, Irish.
Raised in Devon by parents from the west of Ireland, Brassic actor Gaughan spent his childhood moving all around the country, adjusting to various regional dialects to avoid getting bullied, and later worked prolifically as a voice actor and dialect coach. The Emperor is thus a show replete with character work, with Gaughan impersonating everyone from Greta Thunberg and Dr Lucy Worsley to an incompetent teenage magician called ‘The Mysterious Steven’.
The loose premise here is that Gaughan has recently appeared on a regional West Country variant of Who Do You Think You Are?, and found out that his biological father is Napoleon Bonaparte, via a farfetched sequence of events involving the French government keeping a vat of semen beneath Notre Dame. Across the show, Gaughan also introduces us to some of his IVF-conceived half-brothers from the same vat, all of whom, of course, have strong regional accents.
It’s fertile ground for standup, with Napoleon a proxy for all of our anxieties around the troubling politics lurking in the ancestries of even the most progressive families. Unfortunately, though, this is a case of gesturing at issues like toxic masculinity and resurgent nationalism without properly addressing them.
Dr Worsley’s cameo is played disappointingly straight, with Gaughan’s version of the TV historian merely analysing the prototypical tyrant’s masculinity rather than satirising it. His piece de resistance is better, an extended documentary-style video clip featuring Gaughan as a manchild Napoleon, crashing out over his exile to St Helena in front of a long-suffering Josephine, but it’s been a meandering road to get here.
Too much time has been spent on the brothers, whose scenes carry clever gags and fun, empathetic crowdwork, but add little to Gaughan’s political commentary. There are also some misplaced musical sequences with tenuous links to the main thrust of the comedy, which seem mainly designed as a showcase for Gaughan’s skills as a trained jazz musician.
Gaughan is a versatile performer who clearly has much to say politically – much of his best work revolves around the tension between the rural working-class communities he grew up around, the London liberal circles he presently inhabits, and their mistrust of each other. But a few too many ideas were poured together here, causing the most pertinent ones to slip into the background.
Ed Gaughan: The Emperor plays at Just the Tonic at The Caves until 29 August
Photo credit: Louis DiCarlo
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