Writer and Director: Zoë Maltby
Zoë Maltby’s dynamic, inventive one-woman show begins as seductive burlesque. She dances onto the stage in little more than underwear to don a suitably Byronic costume with ruffled shirt and black boots. The engaging script, often witty and occasionally serious, moves rapidly through stand-up style observations, flirtatious interactions with the audience, and a light-hearted audiovisual presentation on the life, works, loves and legacy of Romantic poet George Gordon Byron, aka Lord Byron (1788 –1824).
Maltby studied in Brooklyn and later relocated to London. “This is me in college, working on my 300-page screenplay called Byron in Geneva”, she tells us of one early image. It’s one of many personal revelations in which her own life and Byron’s are intertwined. This meta maze of quotes and references, literary raunch, genuine biography and varied incarnations of Byron’s ghost, involves dozens of illustrative slides.
Drawing on Byron’s narrative poems Childe Harold (“I love not Man the less, but Nature more”) and Don Juan, the show plays with the cultural archetype of the Byronic hero. Maltby defines him (and points out that it is almost exclusively him) as “a pent-up hottie with a penchant for wearing black and gazing across the moor”. One recurring image involves a crowded gallery of Byronic heroes down the ages, from Heathcliff to Kylo Ren, Sherlock Holmes to Edward Cullen, Aragorn to Batman. They are grouped according to how much sex they have and how much they know about it.
Running through Byron’s actual family history, Maltby pauses on his daughter Ada Lovelace, the celebrated mathematician: “What does it say about the daughter of a famous poet that she decides to make numbers her thing?” Misogyny and self-hatred are dissected with playful profundity. “You envy my cruelty,” says the disembodied voice of the poet, who was famously mad, bad and dangerous to know. Byron’s mischievous spirit then eggs her on to insult members of the audience while she remonstrates: “But these are really nice people. They schlepped out to a black box … to see my weird show.”
Maltby works hard to entertain the audience, and no one can fault her determination. She records her tribute attempt to “swim the Hellespont” via lengths of her local lido. There are songs and dances, poems and dialogues, delivered at a diverting and occasionally breathless pace that leaves no room for boredom. She explores her ongoing obsession with the poet as well as her own (and Byron’s) bisexuality. “So do you want to be me or fuck me?” she has the ghost of Byron ask her at one point, and it’s a good question to which the answer is possibly: both.
Reviewed on 23 August 2025
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
70%
Entertaining literary raunch