Josie Long has been performing comedy for over fifteen years. A stalwart of the Edinburgh fringe, countless comedy festivals around the world and a Radio 4 series, she returns to gig in Huddersfield a mere sixteen years after her last appearance! Re-Enchantment feels like a catch-up on Long’s life of who and where she is now.
People often talk of pre and post pandemic lives – the old way and the new norm. For many the pandemic turned everything upside down and a new negotiation of past, present and future still needs to settled. This seems true for Josie Long. In Re-Enchantment we learn of how different her landscape looks since her last major (pre-pandemic) tour and yet we are still firmly rooted in her left of centre politics which form such a backbone of her show. She describes herself as a socialist but not a communist as she can’t be bothered to do the reading!
Long has had two children in the last four years, moved from London to Glasgow and been given an adult diagnosis of ADHD. She scolds anyone in society who used the lockdowns for productivity (writing a novel or learning a new skill) rather than being bravely apathetic with everyone else but it does sound like Long has been very busy with life herself over the last few years. And, of course, major life changes, in the hands of someone like Long, provides rich seams of material.
Long bursts onto stage with such enthusiasm you would be forgiven in thinking she is channelling her own infants. Her instant joy is infectious. Her skill is to immediately put a possible wary audience at ease. She is a safe space unless, of course, you are a Tory! Long doesn’t do jokes per se, observational gags nor is she a storyteller. She leaps around her set, at one point having do one minute’s material in the second half she missed in the first half to make a call back at the end of the show still work. She blames her ADHD or baby brain or a hybrid of both. She is scatty and flighty and in the same breath punches a tremendous truth as to what is wrong with society or politics and what we should be doing to try to fix it.
Long is, and has always been, unapologetic of her politics. Her audience, in the main, share her viewpoint and there is always a danger for orators like Long ending up preaching to the converted – or a shooting fish in a barrel as she describes. Long rightly stays on the correct side of this. The pain she feels for the world and Britain in 2023 never descends into a rant, rather a plea to be better – for us all to take the little bit of responsibility to be better. It is a plea for community no matter how big or small. Long leaves an audience feeling empowered rather than dejected.
By the end of the show she skips offstage again the same way she skipped on but this time to the music of Michael Caine as Scrooge singing Thankful Heart from The Muppet’s Christmas Carol – a call back from an obscure reference, long forgotten from the first half of the show. Despite its seemingly ramshackle appearance Re-Enchantment is a show of precision filled with the joy of the murkiness of life and the hope to be better for the next generation.
Touring until 29th October
The Reviews Hub Score
Scatty but astute
