I don’t think that political soapboxing should ordinarily have a place in comedy. Too often it can seem like a substitute for jokes, rather than exploiting a joke’s unique capacity to de-familiarise things in an enlightening way. Yet I came away from The Future Is Another Place - a show in which Long uses the sentence ‘I am a socialist’ to precede routines at least twice – with all cynicism and apprehension drained away by the mighty force of Long’s personality.Her control over an audience is one that the politicians she attacks would die for. She is demonstrably herself – which is why a political theme doesn’t seem like a topic tacked on to other material for the sake of filling an hour long set, but reflects the use of her personality to reel in the audience across her whole performance. Her skills at inhabiting characters and whimsical storytelling are infused with the same drive and zeal that allows her to denounce the Conservative government. The force that allows her to discuss the aims of UK Uncut is the same one that allows her to unashamedly mime an imagined, and hilarious, ‘play’ starring the Bronte sisters, or describe a near-death experience in such an unselfconscious way.Once the political material could be viewed as an extension of her personality rather than just a routine, my initial suspicions about the pointlessness of being lectured to about the Tories in the context of a predominantly liberal, middle-class arts festival were washed away. This is a political show in the sense that Long engages the audience in a kind of rousing comic activism, rather than just material about current affairs. Though the show may not be particularly radical in terms of its political content - yes, the Tories are bad, we know - it may well be in terms of its tone. Her disarming sincerity takes down the traditional barriers of smug assumptions of knowing irony that characterises a lot of flat and tired stand-up. This is a show with all the adrenaline and power of a rally.
