Conceptual comic Joseph Morpurgo hasn’t been totally absent this last 10 years: he recently brought back his classic 2015 show Soothing Sounds for Baby.
However, Highlander 70 is his first new work in nearly a decade although you’d hardly guess it if you didn’t know: he throws himself into a show with truly esoteric subject matter with the breezy energy of a man who pumps out a weirdy Fringe show a year. And although he’s not an observational stand-up type who was going to talk us through what he’s been up to, there’s just something admirably ballsy about announcing his return with this.
Wearing clay-coloured face paint for whatever reason, he dives straight into the premise. He allegedly randomly happened across a 1970 high school yearbook for a US high school called Highlander Academy, in New Jersey. And from the pictures contained therein he spins an eccentric and amusing yarn about David Moon, a student who appears multiple times in the book. Of course Murpurgo has no real idea who Moon was. But he has crafted a narrative that Moon sits at the heart of, when a private diary detailing the straitlaced student’s love for the most popular girl in school goes missing on graduation day, prompting an epic quest to retrieve it.
I would assume that somehow Morpurgo did happen upon the real yearbook – it seems like too mad a thing to have entirely fabricated – but clearly the wild stories he tells of David and his adventures are not true, from the mildly terrifying audience interactive section where he hunts for punters who look like three of the pupils, to the sublimely insane sequence in which David breaks into the heavily trapped vice principal’s office. They’re a testament to Murporgo’s enduring silliness but also his craftsmanship: the entire show is a multimedia presentation based on pages of the book, often lovingly doctored and animated, with pre-recorded voices for many of the characters shown,
Yes, it’s goofy as hell. No, it’s not massively deep (although there is an underlying poignancy to how distant and alien these people’s long gone youths now look). But really it’s just a joy, a wayward master craftsman returning with some proper daft magic.
