When does a sitcom get too big for its boots? It’s a worry that must have crossed the minds of Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill on returning to the hangar-like Hydro where, in 2014, Still Game played to 210,000 people in 21 nights.
There’s something surreal about seeing the TV escapades of Jack and Victor in a venue where bouncers guard the stage and the audience needs two giant screens just to see what’s happening. Undaunted, they’ve come back with a show of even greater ambition – and just as many laughs.
This time, as if nuanced character comedy weren’t already under threat by the sheer scale of the event, they dare to take their curmudgeonly cast of Clansman regulars out of their natural habitat. It didn’t work when they sent the staff of Are You Being Served? to Costa Plonka, but packing off the Craiglang locals on a second-half cruise gives the show the theatrical lift it has promised from the moment Jane McCarry’s Isa makes her entrance with a pyrotechnic mop.
It’s a show both dependent on its small-screen roots and restless to cast them off – hence the jump from TV interiors to a chorus line in white sailor suits singing Anchors Aweigh. It works because behind the putdowns, the banter and the gloriously lived-in performances of Kiernan and Hemphill, the show is emotionally true. Just beneath the surface are poverty, loneliness, ageing, illness and death, keeping the comedy rooted even on its long (and, yes, a little too long) voyage to Marrakech.
• At the SSE Hydro, Glasgow, until 16 February. Box office: 0844 395 4000.
