You can’t talk about Forbes Masson without talking about Michael Boyd. It was Boyd who spotted Masson and his classmate Alan Cumming doing a student cabaret act at the then RSAMD in Glasgow. It was Boyd who invited them to write and star in Babes In The Wood as their alter egos Victor And Barry at the city’s Tron Theatre in 1987. And it was Boyd who welcomed Masson into the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ensemble, where he stayed from 2003 to 2011.

No wonder Masson wells up at the mention of Boyd’s name. The director died of cancer in August at the age of 68 and the actor keenly feels his loss. ‘I can’t tell you how devastated I am,’ he says. ‘Michael was the reason for so many of my opportunities. He’s in my heart and my brain every time I perform. He was an extraordinary man and Scottish theatre owes so much to him.’

Appropriately, it was through Boyd that he met director Michael Fentiman, who has now cast him in a one-man version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll And Hyde. Adapted by Gary McNair, it tells the chilling story of hypocrisy and wayward science from the point of view of Dr Jekyll’s lawyer, Gabriel Utterson. 

‘We’re not looking at hairy hands and false teeth,’ says Masson who’s taking on a role first performed by Audrey Brisson in 2022. ‘There’s a subtler approach here. It’s more about the psychology.’ The production will be Masson’s first time on the Lyceum stage in Edinburgh since 2003 when he appeared in Peter Arnott’s The Breathing House, another story of furtive Victorian impulses. ‘The Breathing House was all about the dark underbelly of Edinburgh,’ says the Falkirk actor. ‘And Jekyll And Hyde was so shocking that Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife allegedly burned the initial manuscript. It has everything from gothic horror to the duality of the soul and a society that is corrupt underneath. It’s about humanity and primal urges. And there’s the stuff that’s happening politically: all those politicians that are supposed to be looking after us and are monsters underneath.’

Ever creative, Masson is also returning to former glories as he works on a musical version of The High Life, the cult BBC sitcom in which he and Cumming played cabin crew members Steve McCracken and Sebastian Flight, camping it up on a budget airline. Working with playwright Johnny McKnight, director Andrew Panton and National Theatre Of Scotland, Masson is writing songs for a show in which he and Cumming will star in 2025, 30 years after they last prepared for landing. 

‘If we don’t get a move on we’ll be dancing with Zimmers,’ laughs Masson, who is also working on a 40th-anniversary Victor And Barry book with Cumming, due to be published in July by 404 Ink. ‘It’s going to be fun. It’s lovely that people still remember it fondly. I’ve been watching it again and it does stand up. It’s camp old pish, but it’s funny.’

Jekyll And Hyde, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Saturday 13–Saturday 27 January.