There are moments when Joseph Morpurgo regrets not being a stand-up, capable of simply plucking routines from his acclaimed but painstakingly intricate comedy shows, touring with minimal fuss.
“Many’s the time I’m sat on a train, having been up until 2am the night before, desperately knocking together sound cues on what’s essentially a 700-slide PowerPoint presentation,” he laments. “Checking levels, making sure that everything clicks correctly from one slide to the next. I’ve really wished that I could just turn up and tell some jokes with a microphone. Without all this superstructure, this scaffolding, this armour of tech and prep.
“But the joy I get out of what I do comes from drilling incredibly deep into an interesting concept, building worlds, finding ways to make a really rich, dense hour.”
Almost a decade since he last performed solo at the Fringe, after scooping an Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination for 2015’s Soothing Sounds For Baby in the midst of a five-year flurry of dementedly inventive, high-concept, folk art multimedia hours, his cult following doesn’t seem diminished – a Soothing Sounds revival sold out London’s Soho Theatre at Christmas. And only “life’s chicanery” has kept him from bringing another show to the festival before now.
Prior to starting a family, he’d been developing a show that was interrupted by the pandemic. Afterwards, “I didn’t feel inclined to finish it … life got in the way … suddenly years passed.” Though no J.D. Salinger-style recluse, having written extensively for children’s animation and computer games in the interim, as well as penning several comedy pilots for television that ultimately came to naught, he suggests that “it’s not really my disposition to be very online or very available.”
Regardless, he’s remained part of the Austentatious improv troupe, “turning up with nothing but other people … a rather different end of the spectrum” to his “extremely controlled, labour-intensive” individual work. The contrast “doesn’t necessarily keep me sane. But it’s very nice to toggle from one headspace to the other.
“I’m just a normal guy living a normal life” he maintains. “But there’s value in not splurging odds and sods at the world all the time unless they merit consumption.”
To that end, Morpurgo has been carefully and incrementally tinkering with his latest show, Highlander 70, “working on it piecemeal for almost a decade in bits and bobs, exploring it, putting it down, picking it up again.”
Typically, he’s divulging very little about its contents. Once again crafted around a “found artefact”, a yearbook and diaries, there’s some crossover with his 2014 sophomore show, Odessa. But it features a more straightforwardly defined narrative and extensive range of characters than ever before.
And instead of video, he’s “experimenting” with photography and animation. “It’s a very visual show, all about image and the past, though not in the same way Odessa was. It reaches further back than that. And it plays around with things that are static but can be brought to life on stage.
“I’m not a photographer” he explains. “But I am really interested in the way that photography is both scientific and kind of magical. It pins the world down but can tell a thousand different stories, depending on what point you anchor to or hone in on. Photos bring the past to life. But they’re also gravestones to moments that have been and gone.”
He acknowledges that there’s “lots of theoretical stuff in terms of how I’m manipulating the photos under the surface, which is what drew me to this concept.
“But before I sound too highfalutin, it is, hopefully, as inventive, fun, silly and playful as ever.”
And he enthuses: “I love coming up with big ideas, big hooks that haven’t been explored, working with constraints and restraint to realise something singular and unique. Hopefully, audiences can appreciate that I’m spelunking so deep into this concept and I’ve done a huge amount of exploratory faffing around. And they can delight in my insanity in committing to it so, so hard.”
Joseph Morpurgo: Highlander 70, Pleasance Courtyard, until 30 Aug, 7pm