For all the challenges that must come with redefining your sexuality in middle age, if you’re a comedian you can at least get material out of it. Since her breakout 2019 show Hench, Jessica Fostekew has split with the father of her son, and begun a same-sex relationship. This experience of switching lane halfway through life’s journey permeates her new show, which speaks with the freshness of perspective you get from suddenly becoming one thing after 39 years of being another.
It’s not a set with the polemical punch of Hench, which staked out space for women to be muscular. This follow-up, entitled Wench, finds Fostekew in more equivocal mood: a section on the modern near-ubiquity of plastic surgery is even-handed when one expects Fostekew to let rip. Such is the humility, perhaps, that comes with a blindsiding life change – and with age, too. Fostekew is just at that point where you start feeling displaced by the behaviours of a younger generation, sending one another dick pics (to cite her own examples) and peeing without the slightest concern for who might overhear.
Equivocal does not, I should stress, mean mild: Fostekew delivers the whole show at a heck of a tilt. She’s a master of modulation, switchbacking the pace (and the facial expressions), compressing her dismay into a squawked exclamations and barks. But there’s a thoughtfulness behind the tomfoolery, as our host finds new love, and a new sexuality. She moves in with her new partner; one brings a son, the other her cats. Friends ask prurient questions about her new sex life, and a local election candidate drops homophobic campaign leaflets through the letterbox. By coming out as bisexual (or pansexual – she tries on various labels for size), Fostekew discovers her true self, including the privilege, and freedom from this kind of harassment, she barely noticed hitherto.
Her last show was promoted with an image of the comic in boxing gloves; we can’t really expect something as big-hitting. But Wench finds Fostekew in commanding form, reflective and funny in equal measure about swerving to queerness on the way to 40.
• Jessica Fostelew: Wench is at Norden Farm, Maidenhead, on 1 September, then touring.
