Adam Long is fixed in my mind as the boyish idiot in the Reduced Shakespeare Company. His energetic, puppyish misunderstandings caused much comic eye-rolling from his older cohorts, bald Reed Martin and beardy Austin Tichenor, and a great deal of audience hilarity, as the American trio wryly bowdlerised, spoofed and generally sent up Britain’s national poet in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).

This memory dates from the 1994 Edinburgh Festival, before the upstart Yankee version of the RSC had boiled down American History and the Bible, and begun a successful nine-year Bard-in-brief residency at the Criterion.

Long actually left the company he co-founded in 2002, but since then has turned his reductive talents to Wagner’s The Ring, Tony Blair’s life, and the original Star Wars trilogy. He now feels mature enough to add our greatest novelist to his tally of shrunken heads.

Dickens Unplugged represents Long’s first attempt to explore an author’s life alongside his best-known work. We are promised the (shortened) lowdown on Dickens’s hard upbringing and weird marriage, as well as appearances from Oliver Twist, Tiny Tim, Miss Havisham et al. Much of it will be sung, as this is also Long’s first foray into fully fledged musical theatre. There will, we are assured, be five-part harmonies and songs called Ain’t Goin’ Back to Blackin’ and Far Far Better Thing, accompanied by instruments as diverse as the horn and harmonica.

Of course, to get those musical gags you have to know already about Dickens’s formative childhood stint in a blacking factory, and Sidney Carton’s speech from A Tale of Two Cities — which may be a stretch for some.

Then again, who could have guessed how many people would get the sketch in which the RSC reimagined Titus Andronicus as a cookery show? And, luckily for Long, a plethora of BBC Dickens adaptations and the singing Olivers of I’d Do Anything have ensured that Dickens has reappropriated his role as top classic novelist from Jane Austen in the public mind.

And even if, say, a joke about Barnaby Rudge or a song from David Copperfield goes wrong, Adam Long still probably has his wide-eyed, boyish, inventive charm to fall back on.

Previewing now (0844 847 1545).