Grace Petrie is an imperfect activist - and she’d be the first to admit it. She’s hypocritical, she’s misanthropic, she’s disorganised, but in No Time to Panic, Petrie outlines how she’s not going to let that stop her, and neither should you. The folk singer and comedian returns to the North Wall with a set that tries to find hope in the current geopolitical dumpster fire, or indeed, whether hope is really what we ought to be looking for.

She’s accompanied in the first half by poet, graphic novelist and podcaster Molly Naylor (who also happens to be the director of the show and Petrie’s wife). Naylor kicks off the evening with some recitations from her anthology, Whatever You’ve Got. Touching on subject matter from living child free to the little act of rebellion in a ‘gay little haircut’, her style is witty, lyrical, but above all else centred on welcoming in and granting grace to yourself and others - except, perhaps, those that give your poetry backhanded compliments. Her turns of phrase are just delicious to the ear (see her anthem to sobriety, ‘Oh Booze’ for some, pardon the pun, corkers, like ‘indigo fuckwit’ and ‘magical dickhead cordial’). But it’s the generosity in her poetic voice that lingers, an invitation to be kind to yourself and not expect perfection that feeds neatly into the thesis of Petrie’s set.

Whenever the world falls into crisis, there’s always one glib cliché that rears its head among idle commentators: “well, at least we’ll get some good music out of it”. From the jump, Petrie’s here to nip that notion in the bud, her opening number ‘Grace Petrie’s Gonna Do Well Out of This’ hilariously skewering this attitude’s solipsism and self-obsession. Art can inspire you, as Naylor’s poetry touches on, but Petrie makes one thing clear - it’s not going to save you.

It’s still rare in the field of political comedy to see something as refreshingly confrontational and uncompromising as Petrie’s material. Lesser comics will take a few lazy swipes at Trump and be done with it, but Petrie takes full-throated aim at the betrayals of Starmer’s Labour, calls out the Palestinian genocide by name, and in a bold move for a Summertown crowd, uses the laugh-out-loud ballad ‘Louise is a Fucking Landlord’ to call out anyone in the room that thinks they can withhold a basic need for profit and still be considered a decent person. There’s definitely some uncomfortable shuffling in the seats, which only intensifies when she spotlights the hypocrisy of those who suddenly become superfans of women’s sport the second a trans woman dares to get involved. As one of several trans people in the crowd that night, it’s such a rare and pleasant surprise to see a cis person use their platform to unequivocally advocate for our dignity and safety.

And that’s not to say that those on Petrie’s side of the aisle don’t get their share. She brilliantly unpicks the slogan “joy is resistance” commonly used among the online left, by imagining how the women of the Greenham Common Peace Camp would have reacted if confronted with such a phrase (“Mary, come and have a look at this…well I think you’ve got that wrong there, love”). Resistance is resistance, and while joy can be part of it, No Time to Panic argues it should be the result of action, rather than an action itself.

But Petrie cleverly sidesteps the possibility of this becoming a soapbox moment by weaving her own personal foibles throughout. Her ‘YMCA’ parody ‘ADHD’ looks like it will be a critique of young people self-diagnosing neurodivergence, before the rug-pull as Petrie realises mid-song that she actually exhibits every symptom she’s singing about. She discusses at length her doomed DIY projects, her class-traitor rapture at being upgraded to business class (“the glasses have glass!”), and maybe most prominently, her inability to find common ground with other people at a point where that might matter most, expressed with poignantly funny frustration in the track ‘I’ve Never Liked Other People Less’.

Petrie knows she’s as messy as the rest of us - what gives No Time To Panic its heart is that she refuses to let that be an excuse. She can’t promise hope, or say things will be fine, because it would be foolhardy to do so. If change is going to come about, hope isn’t enough; what Petrie advocates for instead is courage: to know that things may not turn out in your favour, and to do the right thing anyway; to, as her final number puts it, “occupy your mind”.