Joseph Morpurgo returns with a new live show after some years, and it reaches his high standards. He’s written a comedy play based on a single object that he pillages from every angle: an American high school yearbook from the 1970s. We don’t know where he got this comedy gold mine. We do know that in most people hands, it would be, at best, a mildly interesting curiosity. But it’s a gold mine to Joseph Morpurgo, and he brings the audience along, to show us what he can see in it.
He finds the odd details in the background, the incongruent expressions, the creepy smiles and confusingly organized candid shots. He finds the inside jokes with their meaning lost to time, and Morpurgo comes up with his own meanings, breathing new life into them.
He presents these by playing various characters from the yearbook, occasionally getting members of the audience to help. For the information of potential viewers who are wary of this, the audience participation is mainly limited to two bits, the latter of which draws only from the front row. The former bit picks three people from across the crowd, so if you avoid the very front, your chances of getting picked are 3 in [venue capacity – assuming a sold-out show, which this deserves to be]. Not bad odds.
The whole thing has a vibe of John Hughes movies: old school American high school, jocks and nerds and bullies and strict principals, the Big Game and the sense that at any moment someone might get shoved in a locker (though fortunately, Morpurgo lets us experience the John Hughes vibe without the sexual assault). It also takes inspiration from other vintage American tropes, including a very funny song in the style of West Side Story.
There’s a poignancy to making a story like this in 2026, to think about all the hope for their future that those real teenagers would have had when graduating high school in the 1970s, and everything they’ve lived through since. Morpurgo hits us with that poignancy sparingly and quickly, in just the right dose to leave us thinking about the implications.
This show is incredibly tightly written, brilliantly performed, and at least on the night I saw it, all the multimedia tech cues went off without a hitch. Every joke landed, and at the end, the standing ovation it got felt entirely natural. I try not to overuse standing ovations, or words like “masterpiece”. But this show deserves them both.
Alex Finch