THE Glesca’ roaring boys are on the town, on the lam, on the lookout for a quick Highland fling. And no, it’s not the country dance they mean - although once the bevvy takes hold, they’ll cut loose, leaping and birling and totally rockin’ it. They’re after a frisky, ‘hands on/no names and hope the girlfriend doesn’t find out’, kind of fling. It’s a prospect that’s making them swagger like wannabe stud muffins - and just thinking about it has Christopher Hampson in fits of laughter, because the guys strutting the raunchy stuff are members of Scottish Ballet, on-stage in Matthew Bourne’s wonderfully gallus updating of that heritage classic, La Sylphide.

“The opening section of his Highland Fling is one of my favourite bits in the whole two acts,” says Hampson. “It’s a night-club scene that descends into utter debauchery in the first seven minutes of the ballet. Booze, drugs, people snogging in the bogs - no holds barred, and then there’s a black-out. It really takes an audience unawares. Surprises and disarms them because it’s funny and brilliantly irreverent - and it could be going on, for real, in a night-club somewhere in the city. Yet what they’re going to see is essentially La Sylphide, a 19th century romantic ballet that, in this version, is very much a ballet for today.”

It was that enthusiasm for giving old ballets new relevance that Hampson took with him into the interview when, in 2012, he applied for the post of artistic director with Scottish Ballet. Moreover, he had already approached Bourne - whom he had worked with in the past - and had secured permission to stage Highland Fling with the company. This was quite a coup. It was, and still is, the only Bourne ballet to be performed by a company other than his own New Adventures. A year later, in April 2013, Hampson was settling into his leadership role at Scottish Ballet and the company was performing Matthew Bourne’s Highland Fling at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.

Five years on, and designer Lez Brotherston’s tongue-in-cheek salute to all things tartan-clad - and that includes the walls of a kitsch-cluttered living room - will be back on stage there, for the opening night of a spring tour that will see Scottish Ballet take Highland Fling to venues they have never played before. Of late, the Bourne ballet has proved a useful calling card when the company has been setting up touring schedules abroad. New York and Hong Kong are among the overseas destinations that have seen hard-drinking, drug-taking, unemployed welder James kick over the traces when he leaves his fiancee Effie for an undead Sylph who flies in at the window of his high-rise flat. Now it’s time for Lerwick, Kirkwall, Oban and Stornoway to see what all the accolades are about.

“We have already performed in smaller venues in the highlands and islands,” says Hampson. “But I came away feeling that - although the dancers had been great - the company hadn’t really been seen at its best. And I wanted the audiences who saw us in those short works to see what we were able to offer audiences in the main-scale city venues: namely full-length ballets, like Highland Fling.

"When I took this job I was serious about making sure that these audiences, who pay their taxes too, could see the same kind of production that we put on stage in Glasgow or Edinburgh. Not a cut-down version, but a fully-fledged production. So our amazing tech teams have really stepped up to that challenge, and have found ways of transforming spaces - sports halls, basically - into theatres with a stage, a proscenium arch and a lighting rig that matches up to the requirements of Highland Fling. I think Matthew, who’s been back with us in rehearsals, is quite tickled that Scottish Ballet is taking his ‘Scottish ballet’ to the Highlands!”

In a way, however, Hampson is fulfilling the promise that the company’s founder, the late Peter Darrell, had in mind almost fifty years ago when he brought the then Bristol-based Western Theatre Ballet to Glasgow. A ‘ballet for Scotland’ meant taking dance nation-wide, and Hampson reckons if they can transport Highland Fling to Hong Kong, they can get it to Orkney and Lewis.

“I do know that, because Highland Fling is a very funny, very modern dance piece, some people don’t see it as being a ‘classical’ ballet. But if you already know the original La Sylphide, then you’ll spot the references to that choreography in Matthew’s version. And his steps are every bit as demanding, believe me. It has to be precise if the humour - or the tragedy - is to be effective so that you spend the first act laughing out loud, and the second act crying into your programme and just loving both halves.”

The lads are back in town - with glammed-up lasses and eerie, unearthly Sylphs - next week when Scottish Ballet revives Matthew Bourne’s Highland Fling at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal (April 4 - 7)

Tour details are at www.scottishballet.co.uk