Josie Long visits the Old Vic with her acclaimed 2025 Fringe show, ‘Now Is The Time of Monsters.’ It’s lovely to see comedy in the Old Vic, as it’s such a beautiful venue, and since winter has apparently arrived in Bristol at 11am today, it feels appropriately cosy to go to the theatre and watch a show on a cold Sunday evening – even if today is the first day its felt remotely cold. This turned out to be very in keeping with the themes of Long’s show.
Long saunters onstage with the casual confidence of someone who’s been performing comedy for many years, and as the first woman to be nominated three times for the Edinburgh Comedy Award. She’s her own support act, and radiates a benign and whimsical energy, launching straight into the trials of being ‘left wing, but not in a fun way,’ ageing, Macklemore, and an extended and very funny anecdote about her morals being tested in real life when she unexpectedly encountered Reform Deputy leader Richard Tice on an Avanti train. The theatre isn’t quite full, but the female-dominated crowd merrily laugh along, and Long expertly creates a gently confessional atmosphere.
After the interval, we get into the show proper. The show’s narrative is centred around the prehistoric megafauna which she reads to her elder daughter about every night, and she uses it as an anchor to explore ageing, moving to Scotland and the simpler, less ruinous lives of humans of many epochs ago, compared to the (comparatively) little animals and self-inflicted disasters we now find ourselves contending with. It takes considerable skill to make the latter funny, and Long manages to walk a skilful line between sobering and witty, and isn’t fearful of letting a serious moment sit. This is parallelled with her experiences of ageing, while simultaneously experiencing the trials of parenting young children (‘I’ve been affecting a bitter laugh to get me through the day’), and she’s an expert at throwing in whimsical observations and one-liners, including several excellent ones about neurotypical people and middle-aged Glaswegian climbers.
There’s a great running joke about silt, and excellent moments of physicality, including the merry dance of someone without a moral core and a short section in which she talks through her t-shirt. She also incorporates her own artwork throughout, which is a fun and fresh addition to the stand-up dynamic, and feels slightly like an endearingly chaotic show-and-tell. The show builds to an emotionally charged but wholesome conclusion, and it’s reflective of Long’s experience and candour that that the usual emotional beats of a show’s final minutes are both genuine and subtly integrated rather than feeling like a forced push for audience empathy.
The show was an hour at the Fringe, and stretches here to about an hour and twenty minutes. It is well-structured and never suffers in quality, but the audience’s enthusiasm starts to struggle a little towards the end – although this is partly attributable to it being a Sunday night. Long expertly builds it to a peak several times, and while the final reveal is brilliantly inventive, it might benefit from being slightly more compressed in its last third. It’s stand-up that feels both endearingly intimate and vigorously potent, all the more so as Labour continues their avalanche of depressingly reactionary policy reveals. Hopefully next time Long encounters Richard Tice, Nigel Farage will be there too.