'Clueless isn't realistic, it's happier, cleaner, less strife'

With a fresh script and songs by KT Tunstall, the 90s classic is back in musical form at the West End. Annabel Nugent meets the cast along with writer/director Amy Heckerling

- Annabel Nugent

Time travel may not yet be possible, but for the next best thing watch Clueless. In the two decades since its release, Amy Heckerling's cult-classic teen movie has become shorthand for Nineties pop culture: flip phones, plaid skirts, sassy slang. The two syllables of its title seem to pack more nostalgia than literal rose-tinted glasses. At the centre of it all is, of course, Alicia Silverstone’s blonde, sweet-as-pie high schooler Cher, a Beverly Hills update on Jane Austen’s most likeably unlikeable heroine Emma.

Now 30 years after the film’s release, Clueless the Musical has arrived in the West End, with original music by Noughties guitar queen KT Tunstall. No one is happier about this than Heckerling herself, who has written a new script, and who from the start had always pictured her candy-coloured story set to snazzy choreography.

“It’s not a realistic world I was making,” Heckerling explains in between rehearsals at Trafalgar Theatre. “It’s happier, nicer, cleaner, richer, with less strife, less racial tension. Everything is wonderful and the only thing to worry about is who likes who.” In short, it’s a musical sort of world. But back then, she shrugs, Hollywood wasn’t making musicals.

Fans of the original can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that this is a faithful adaptation. The story remains the same: teen queen Cher (now played by the equally blonde Emma Flynn) rules her school as a benevolent dictator whose vow to do more “good deeds” leads to her taking a new girl under her wing and playing cupid with two lonely teachers. It remains as compulsively quotable as ever; “As if!” gets a whole song of its own while.