This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
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...
Truthmouth: an arts charity that specialises in developing verbatim theatre, where scripts are written word-for-word from genuine conversations.
That’s total nonsense, of course. Truthmouth is totally made up. But it’s an effective, straightforward hook to tie together character comic (and Austentatious member) Joseph Morpurgo’s hugely accomplished debut solo show.
There are oodles of ideas packed into this innovative hour. Morpurgo rapidly runs through character after character – each aided by a Google image search result or clip art picture projected behind him – mixing short, one-liner skits with longer set pieces. Among others, we meet an over-enthusiastic TV chef, a veteran Uno player, a friendly private assassination service employee and a possessed Irish farmer.
Morpurgo is a capable, if not flawless performer – he relies on shoutiness a little too much – but the complex script is superbly written. Barely a sentence goes by without a neat joke or pop culture reference, and his punchlines are rarely predictable. A sketch about a man recently made redundant at first feels out of place, until the killer pay off is revealed, and those in the front row will wish they hadn’t taken off their raincoats when they meet a long-forgotten character from the Nokia 3310.
The joke rate and consistency is remarkably high, and there’s rarely a dud character. The ending could use a bit of reordering – a sketch turning the attention to Morpurgo’s tech operator feels like a natural, satisfying finish… then there’s still one more sketch to go. But Morpurgo’s produced a show that’s crammed full of inventive ideas and ludicrously silly one-man skits. A mightily impressive debut.
See 'Joseph Morpurgo – Truthmouth' at the Edinburgh Fringe