The High Life: The Musical ★★★★★

By The Recs JM - James McLuckie 2 weeks ago

Cult classic sitcom ‘The High Life’ returns and takes flight in musical form.

It says much for the enduring affection towards The High Life that a BBC comedy that ran for just one short season back in 1995 remains a pillar of Scottish entertainment. There was always something singular about the creation that Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson concocted: camp but not coy, arch but never smug, and fizzing with a very particular kind of Caledonian absurdity.

If anyone were to set out to make the ideal High Life stage musical nearly three decades later, it would be a challenge to imagine it turning out much better than this.

Images by Tommy Ga Ken Wan

Picking right up with the cadence of the TV show, this National Theatre of Scotland revival reunites all four principal cast members. Cumming and Masson (hopeless ‘trolly dollies’ Sebastian Flight and Steve McCracken) return alongside the incomparable Siobhan Redmond as cabin crew head, Shona Spurtle, and are joined by Patrick Ryecart’s madcap Captain Hilary Duff.

Sebastian and Steve are still bickering, still preening, still coasting through their duties while making life a misery for the formidable yet quietly fragile Shona. That the chemistry between them remains so intact is central to the show’s success. The rhythms are still there, and so too is the glorious silliness.

Cumming and Masson, joined in the writing by Johnny McKnight, know exactly what kind of world they are reviving and what their audience expects from it.

The much-maligned Air Scotia is under threat of takeover, its future hanging in the balance as the prospect of becoming yet another bland British airline looms. That allows the show to prod at questions of ageing and nationalism without ever growing po-faced about either.

A secondary plot sees Steve reunite with the love of his life (Louise McCarthy as Heather Argyll), which gives Sebastian’s jealousy room to bloom in ways both ridiculous and unexpectedly touching.

The cast throw themselves into the Andrew Panton-directed madness with admirable gusto. Cumming, Masson and Redmond remain commanding throughout, while Ryecart continues to lend his role a wonderfully game sense of bemused dignity. The newer players (among them Kyle Gardiner and Rachael Kendall Brown), introduced to flesh out the run time and expand the world, do so deftly enough, with McCarthy a particular standout. Fast becoming a fixture of Scottish comedy, she fits seamlessly into the show’s manic register.

That register is broad, unapologetic and often gloriously daft. Many of the references are sharply topical; others are so niche they feel almost mischievously exclusionary. A joke involving Sheena Easton being pelted with bottles in 1990 may not land equally for every audience member, but for those who catch it, the laugh is all the richer. There are puns, throwaway one-liners and theatrical in-jokes aplenty, all delivered with the sort of relish that dares you not to keep up.

Masson certainly earns his pin money here by also composing the show’s spirited musical numbers, that often recall crowd-pleasing classics such as Grease

One surprise is how relatively chaste the whole thing is. For a show built around innuendo, camp chaos and airborne misbehaviour, it never quite tips into the kind of post-watershed ribald energy one might have expected. Still, that restraint scarcely matters when the enthusiasm and energy are this high. A drug-induced sequence proves a particular highlight, thanks in no small part to Gardner’s immaculate comic timing.

A joyous blend of panto, puns, parody and pure Scottish nonsense, The High Life: The Musical – Still Living It is a loving revival that understands exactly why this strange little curio endures. It remains daft, delightful, and very much worth checking in for.

Mile-high mischief from a cult classic that refuses to stay grounded ★★★★★ 5 stars

The High Life - the Musical Tickets

The High Life - the Musical runs at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh (until 11 Apr), then His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen (14 – 18 Apr), Eden Court, Inverness (29 Apr – 2 May) and King’s Theatre, Glasgow (12 – 23 May)

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The Recs JM - James McLuckie
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