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If someone tells you this musical spin-off from the cult 1994 TV sitcom is like a pantomime, they won’t just mean the jokes. Having been written by Johnny McKnight and the series creators, Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson, it is, of course, top-loaded with gags. They tumble out in a cross-cultural collage, referencing everyone from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to Sheena Easton (yes, some more topical than others), in a deliriously silly festival of wisecracks. The one about asthma alone is worth the ticket price.

But the panto roots go deeper than that. It is in the direct address, the community singalong, the underwater neon-tube dance and the two-dimensional approximation of a Brigadoon hotel, complete with tartan wallpaper, exuberantly designed by Colin Richmond. There is a man-size dog and two costume changes at the curtain call. Oh, yes there is.

It is in this joyful spirit that we are reunited not only with Cumming as Sebastian Flight and Masson as Steve McCracken, the brittle flight attendants on a micro-budget airline, but also a turbocharged Siobhan Redmond as Shona Spurtle, their exacting superior, and a spaced-out Patrick Ryecart as Captain Hilary Duff, the deranged pilot. This “legacy cast” is supported by a high-energy team – Rachael Kendall Brown, Louise McCarthy and Kyle Gardiner chief among them – romping through Masson’s excellent songs, which are as high in laughs as they are clever in internal rhymes. Ranging from Broadway to Eurovision, they skip along.

We need not be detained by the Beano-esque plot involving the threatened takeover of Air Scotia by UK Air and a diversion into the time-warped Lower Largo Triangle, except in as far as it reveals something like a serious purpose. Behind the cartoon capers lie questions also raised a few years ago by Rob Drummond in his adaptation of The Broons: how do we grow old with dignity when even the signifiers of nationhood are showing their age? Can we reconcile ourselves with the past and live in the moment? Is our self-image, like the panto form itself, due a refresh?

But let’s not get too weighty. More than anything, Andrew Panton’s production for Dundee Rep and the National Theatre of Scotland is one big, happy laugh.

• At Dundee Rep until 4 April. Then touring until 23 May.