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The High Life: The Musical – Still Living It!

Dundee Rep

Four stars


As lost horizons go, Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s short-lived 1994 sitcom could hardly be bettered in terms of rediscovery. The original saw Cumming and Masson cast themselves as Sebastian Flight and Steve McCracken, the cabin crew and in-flight double act of Air Scotia, Scotland’s best - and only - airline, in a riotous camperama that took retro styled kitsch into the stratosphere. With Sebastian and Steve aided and abetted by Siobhan Redmond’s terrifying trolley dolly Shona Spurtle and Patrick Ryecart’s space cadet Captain Duff, the sky was the limit. So too, alas, was the limbo Cumming and Masson’s sitcom maiden voyage was left in just as it appeared to be going places. 


More than three decades on, and with the show’s creators flying high, they have joined forces with their natural theatrical heir Johnny McKnight to create this box set size musical reboot that sees Sebastian, Steve and the gang reunited as they set the controls for the heart of the fun once more. 


Taking a cue from the 1970s big screen takes on old school sitcoms that kept the British film industry afloat, Cumming, Masson and McKnight flesh things out with an everyday crisis, as Air Scotia looks set to be bought up and deScotified in a hostile takeover. This becomes the dramatic drive for the all singing, all dancing comic whirlwind that follows, part sitcom, part panto and part Scooby Doo mystery.  A theme tune, catchphrases,  lashings of tartan shortbread cliches, and a disaster movie parody are duly thrown in alongside Masson’s hipster cheese-core songbook. 


The end result in Andrew Panton’s production - presented by the National Theatre of Scotland and Dundee Rep Theatre in association with Aberdeen Performing Artsand Capital Theatres - is a gloriously knowing confection writ large on Colin Richmond’s ever expanding jet age set. This sees Cumming and Masson taking the rise out of their own vintage as they play with expectations of big name led drama, showboating like crazy in a series of impeccably bonkers routines. There is at least one brilliant gag delivered by Rachael Kendall Brown’s new gen air hostess Kylie as the lay of the land is set up for those too young to have seen the original. 


Redmond is a terminally ferocious treat as Shona, while Ryecart is deliriously off beam as Captain Duff. If the show’s first half has fun with its form, the second moves into the hallucjnogenically surreal. This is ramped up by as Louise McCarthy’s former lager lovely Heather Argyll, who turns the tables on both Sebastian and her ex beau Steve by way of the massed ranks of what looks like an Irn Bru coloured cult. 


Also in there are what are probably the best AI and MAGA gags you’re likely to have heard in a show that winks at the audience with a cheek that after so long away now straddles several generations of comic largesse in irresistible fashion. Just sayin’, but oh, death me, what a wonderful flight of fancy this is. 


The Herald, April 4th 2026


Ends 



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