Josie Long: Tender, Soho Theatre, review: in mourning for Motherland? Then this is the show for you
What a delight it is to have Josie Long back. If you feel the national mood has grown glummer lately – tempers shorter, nerves more strained – it might just be because it has been five long, Longless years since her last tour.
Ever since arriving on the stand-up scene as a bright-eyed 17-year-old, Long (now 37) has championed a kind of irrepressible optimism that makes her an unusual flavour on the circuit. Her shows can feel like being caught in the full beam of a 100-watt sun lamp.
A cynic might say Long is still that 17-year-old, that there’s something calculatedly childlike about her ebullient schtick. It’s quite possible to find her stage-manner grating, but if you can get on board with it – and I did – it’s the perfect cure for a spot of November SAD.
At the start of her new show Tender, however, the message is less than sunny. “Life is so hard!” she howls, off-mic. “And so long!” Those, she claims, were her first words to her now 13-month-old daughter.
The hour follows the course of her pregnancy, leading up to a 50-hour labour which felt like a cross between “MDMA and death”. There are some visceral nuggets of observational comedy along the way: her description of making awkward small-talk with the midwife between contractions, while her baby’s head lolled surreally out between her legs, is something I won’t forget in a hurry.
Grappling with parenthood has been a defining theme of stand-up in 2019. Jessica Fostekew’s account of an excruciating labour in Hench, and baffled new dad Ivo Graham’s The Game of Life (both currently touring the UK) were highlights, but for my money Long’s Tender is the show that best captures the full range of hormonal highs and lows. Having caught an early performance of this show three months ago, I was surprised to find it even funnier on second time round. Anyone in mourning for BBC Two’s recently ended Motherland will relish it.
Long makes the most of new motherhood’s roller-coaster of sleep-deprivation and mood swings, its abrupt gear-shifts suiting her already off-kilter delivery. She never knows how she’ll feel from one second to the next: “Two days ago I started crying because there was an accountant on the television.” An extended rant about everything wrong with dried dates ends in Long suddenly admitting that, actually, she rather likes them.
Running alongside all this is an ongoing discussion about environmental activism, mainly as a dialogue between Long and her daughter’s cuddly toy seal. All her displaced anxiety about parenthood, she explains, has been channelled into fear about climate change. It’s a way of tying the personal to the political that mostly works, though not always. At times, it veers dangerously close to a lecture, but it’s largely saved by Long’s just-figuring-all-this-stuff-out enthusiasm. “I read an article! By George Monbiot!” she gasps, as if in awe at this achievement.
Long’s faux-naïve idealism makes her a far more effective polemicist than most other political stand-ups, too many of whom mistake condescension for conviction and pessimism for wit. There’s nothing edgy about going on stage in a slick suit to complain that the world is “s---”, she argues. It’s far edgier to turn up covered in your baby’s “s---” and say you hope things might be alright.
Until Nov 20; josielong.com
