Joseph Morpurgo: Highlander 70 review – a dork’s last day at school is one to remember

2 days ago 3

It’s as if Joseph Morpurgo had never been away. The Londoner made a splash on the fringe a decade ago with several high-concept comedy shows, of which thrift-shop source material and multimedia presentation were standout features. After a nine-year absence, the same is true of Highlander 70, a one-man comic play built exclusively around an American high-school yearbook salvaged from half a century ago. Drawing on that 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. He must navigate assembly, the big game, graduation – and then he’s free. “What could possibly go wrong?”

A shot of man showing just his hands and the back of his head as he examines a black and white photograph with some machinery.

In Morpurgo’s telling, plenty, as our juvenile hero (face painted grey, the better 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, the school’s martinet principal, its bully Roscoe Peltz and his crew of unconvincing tough guys, and a dance-hall full of dangerously intoxicated adolescents.

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 here is the daftness of the project, the thought of 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. 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 I’m not sure justifies 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.