Joseph Morpurgo's new one-man comic play, Highlander 70, is a highly entertaining return to the Edinburgh fringe after a nine-year absence. The Londoner, who made a splash a decade ago with high-concept comedy shows featuring thrift-shop source material and multimedia presentation, now builds a show exclusively around an American high-school yearbook from half a century ago.
A breakneck tale from a salvaged yearbook
Drawing on the book's text and mainly innocent black-and-white photographs of wholesome teens, Morpurgo cobbles together a breakneck tale of dorky David Moon's last day of school. Moon must navigate assembly, the big game, and graduation – and then he's free. “What could possibly go wrong?”
In Morpurgo's telling, plenty. The juvenile hero (face painted grey to resemble his monochrome original) embarks on a quest to recover his missing diary, which contains mortifying evidence of a crush on schoolmate Beth. Standing in his way are the school's martinet principal, bully Roscoe Peltz and his crew of unconvincing tough guys, and a dance-hall full of dangerously intoxicated adolescents.
Frenetic energy and droll multimedia
Moon/Morpurgo navigates all this with frenetic energy on stage and on an upstage screen, where images from the yearbook (with DIY animation and voiceovers attached) accompany or undercut the narrative to droll effect.
The overarching joke is the daftness of the project: Morpurgo poring over this random artefact from the past, looking for each tiny incongruity (a curious facial expression in the background; an odd diagram on the blackboard) around which a gag might be built or a story told.
Poignancy and highs
The tale that emerges – squeaky-clean David learns to live a little – is simple but stirring, and Morpurgo ladles on poignancy at the end with an imagined “where are they now?” sequence. There are lulls, including an audience participation sequence that may not justify itself, but far more highs, such as the West Side Story-alike teenage bully dance number.
For the most part, Highlander 70 keeps you highly entertained as Morpurgo sets every US high-school cliche spinning off in unlikely directions, distilling amid the nonsense both teen spirit and the bittersweet ineffability of the photographed past. At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August.
