Buxton Festival Fringe has a strong tradition of wide-ranging of one- person shows with the bar now set very high for both originality and performance. ‘Flora Macdonald and Zombies’ certainly aimed to step up to this challenge, taking a famous eighteenth century piece of Scottish history and throwing zombies into the mix.
The blending of both Vampires and Zombies with real historical people has become something of a sub-genre (think ‘Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter’) with a movie blending ‘Pride and Prejudice’ with zombies. Painting Flora Macdonald as zombie killer was an interesting choice because her historical fame derives from just a few weeks of looking after a destitute Bonnie Prince Charlie on a barren Hebridean island. Here she was given the chance to live for 500 years in an ongoing battle against zombies, extending her story across both geography and time.
Debbie Cannon started the show as Flora Macdonald giving the audience the historical background through a warm and engaging characterisation but the ensuring story was largely told through extensive monologues of other characters, most notably Bonnie Prince Charlie, the King of the Zombies, a Vampire-killing Cat and a modern-day schoolgirl. There were only a few limited conversations between characters because Cannon clearly wanted to take the audience with her into the depth of each character, effectively delivering each portrayal as a real, distinctive person.
This was a very physical performance, at times breaking the fourth wall by sitting amongst the audience and frequently engaging individual audience members with direct eye contact, making the experience very personal. The swaggering persona of the Zombie king was brought over with a menacing twist as the audience was held spell-bound, in sharp contrast to the school girl, who recounted frequent extremely gory happenings of getting involved in a zombie battle with a very-funny, childlike innocence.
There was little plot to this tale but the emphasis was on character and both the historical backdrop and the violent world of fighting zombies were blended with great comic effect. A remarkable feature of the performance was the fast, consistent pace, with no time wasted for costume changes as Cannon barely stopped to take a breath, moving easily between characters.
This a very funny and captivating show with an off-beat premise, principally held together by a carefully chosen mix of sharply contrasting characters, for the most part telling their own version of events in a matter-of-fact Scottish manner, which presented great comedy potential for the both frequently absurd and gory subject matter. Debbie Cannon displayed great comic timing, blending history and fantasy in a funny and engaging piece of theatre.
Reviewer - John Waterhouse
On - 9th July 2025
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