Shay Mace
What Empire, you ask? The Middlesbrough Empire, an iconic nightclub in the North East town, frequented by the equally iconic Lizzie, who knows the name of every bouncer, bartender, and regular you could meet. When Lizzie’s hedonistic habits meet a serious family crisis, she faces a reckoning – grow out of her party girl phase for the sake of her sister’s health, or continue to burrow down into the thin catharsis of drinking your worries away. Sasha Snowdon’s kaleidoscopic show, based on a personal story, lifts up important themes surrounding care, family, and most importantly, blood stem cell donation.
Blood is what comes to define this story – from Lizzie’s initial phobia of it, to how, through discovering whether or not she can be her sister’s stem cell donor, she has what it takes to truly commit to her proverbial blood, her family, and climb out of the enticing debaucherous lifestyle she’s fallen into. Snowdon performs Lizzie with gusto and charm, and a keen commitment to making her a multi-faceted character. In vignettes throughout drunken nights out, hospital visits, and life-altering meetings with a Doctor, we see Lizzie face her sins and absence, developing into a reflective, earnest, and likeable human being, even through her faults.
Moments in which Snowdon performs other characters in the story mark out as among the stronger in the piece, showing her range but also giving a more rounded feeling of worldbuilding around the community that Lizzie so vividly describes. We end up seeing little of that community, and more moments of fracture. That being said, a resolution in which Lizzie and her mother share a greatly tender interaction does provide that pay-off eventually, even if it could have been more clearly laced into the storyline.
The arc of Lizzie’s character is strong, a;lthough there is a permeable sense of repetition that floods through the story, and from which the narrative arc struggles to create a satisfying through-line. We flit between club nights, where the same music is used, through to blinding clinical hospital rooms, in which Lizzie tends to describe the same sensory experiences in the same vocabulary each time, and it isn’t long before this slacks attention from the room. Using quite traditional solo storytelling techniques, it struggles to capture a theatrical language that gives the important story behind it a palpability or deep-felt resonance, even though Lizzie’s characterisation is strong.
Moments of audience interaction offer a well-needed injection of energy to the piece, but could be more seamlessly interwoven with the piece’s story. In fact, a whole framing device around the audience being on their first night out in Middlesbrough falls into the background quite early on, and more of a tangible commitment to this device would offer a deeper emotional attachment to the character and her story, as well as being a reference point to draw away from the more repetitive scenes and deliver richer moments of pathos.
Queen of The Empire, yes, but it feels we need to find out more about the world she is Queen of to see this piece ascend to deliver the emotive and resonant themes which are clearly close to the performers heart, and deserve amplification on the stage. Nonetheless, Snowdon’s script delivers whip-smart quips in tandem with hearty, burgeoning warmth and nuance.
Performances of Queen of The Empire have now concluded at Durham Fringe 2026. Catch the piece at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe next month at theSpace @ Surgeon’s Hall – Nicholson Theatre on August 8, 10, 12, 14 from 10:35 (50mins). Tickets are available through theSpaceUK Online Box Office.
Queen of The Empire is partnered with DKMS – a charity giving blood cancer patients a second chance at life. Find out more about their work on their website.
Isabella Pettite
