The Napoleonic era was marked by many things, not least a multiplicity of dates and names. Take José I (King of Spain 1808-1813), a Corsican lawyer and former King of Naples who still appears in Spanish history books under the nickname Pepe Botella (Pepe the Drunk). The French Joseph, the Italian Giuseppe, or the Corsican Ghjuseppe Buonaparte or Bonaparte (all the same guy) was the older brother of Napoleon I, self-named Emperor of the French (1804-1814). 

Placed on the Spanish throne after his brother ousted the Bourbons, Joseph relished his reign about as much as his kingdom relished him. The Peninsula War (a British, Spanish and Portuguese collaboration) raged throughout, marked by resistance by pro-Bourbon guerrillas. The coalition eventually won: Joseph fled, Napoleon was banished to St. Helena island, and Ferdinand VII was reinstated to the Spanish throne; although his nickname proved even worse than his predecessor’s: el Rey Felón (King Criminal).

The Spanish uprising in March 1808 apparently astonished Napoleon, who, excommunicated by the Catholic Pope, saw French forces as bringing reason to a superstitious country. According to Stendhal (the French novelist Henri Beyle) in his contemporary biography, Napoleon was impressed by the revolt in a way, remarking that the Spanish people were “very stupid and very brave”. 

In late July 1808 just nine days after Joseph was placed on the throne, he retreated with much of the French Army to Vitoria in northern Spain, where a furious Napoleon travelled from Paris to urge him to return to Madrid. And finally! It is this encounter between middle-aged brothers and a third younger historical figure, Roustam Raza, Napoleon’s mamluk or slave, that forms the basis for this fictionalised biographical play by Ramon Madaula.

As in the Ridley Scott movie, the great history paintings of the Louvre have surely provided inspiration for Els Buonaparte. Staged at the Teatre Akadèmic, the play tells a tale of two brothers with both epic and intimate scope evoked by the space. Sibling affection and rivalry play out in two interrelated zones. In the foreground, a hostel room in which the action unfolds around a domestic scene of bathtub and dinner table. In the background, a screen creates depth on which a painterly “poetics of shadows, light and colour” play, suggesting both a vast landscape and even more vast ambition. Toy soldiers smatter the backdrop, sticking out on a blank map where detail begs to be drawn – as Eugène Delacroix did in his sketchbook on Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1798-1801).

There were just 17 months between the births of the brothers, the eldest surviving amidst five stillbirths or infant deaths. For a while it must have been just the two of them, yet Napoleon seems less concerned about mortality. Pau Roca plays the Emperor as a strutting, impatient man, more in line physically with that of the Romantic hero on horseback, than the short and dumpy ‘Old Boney’ as the British called him. By comparison, Joseph (played by David Bagés) is a more anxious portly sort, more amenable though less at home in the vulnerability of his culottes, in which the two men spend their entire encounter – bicorne on and off. 

The stand off between siblings would not be complete without Raza, a man from Georgia of Armenian origin and a gift – later to history via his memoir – but earlier to Napoleon from the Sheikh of Cairo. The Emperor’s “trusted bodyguard and valet” is played by Oriol Guinart as a obsequious figure who glides about the stage, puncturing the pomposity of the others with “the stabbing wit of the Shakespearean fool”. 

But where the savvy slave goes, danger lurks for the hubristic revolutionary. As each sibling bathes – Josep tolerating the tepid, soiled waters of his younger brother, but wary of Raza’s intimate massage – you can’t help but think of Jean-Paul Marat: fatally stabbed in the bath by the disarming, disappointed and deadly Charlotte Corday.