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I’ve followed Josie Long’s career every since I spotted her in the semi-final of the BBC New Comedy Awards in 1999. She went on to win that competition and she has never disappointed me. But I thought that this show was going to be the moment we parted ways. Having become political, angry and more vital in recent years, suddenly Long as moved away from agitprop comedy onstage just as we need her more than ever.
Cara Josephine is very much a personal show about Long’s search for happiness. Fortunately it finds her on inspiring, brilliant form once again. Needless to say I was quickly won over as she poured her cool poet’s heart out to us and catalogued her romantic travails. Just when she thinks she has met the right man things tend to go pear-shaped. But then Long does have rather exotic tastes in men, as she explains with reference to a rather unlikely TV drama character.
Long is so skilled at crafting an anecdote that sometimes it seems that anything will be interesting when she tells it. A potentially trivial story about missing a flight could be a tedious snooze of a travel tale from anyone else. In Long's hands it become a yarn of epic proportions, full of characters, voices and high drama. Spotting a love bite on the neck of a teenage McDonald’s assistant prompts her to reflect upon her own mortality. At 32 she suddenly feels ancient, concluding that you can never have a proper respectable grown-up job and also a monumental hickey.
The subtext of her story is her obvious broodiness. She is approaching that early-thirties thing when her friends are starting families and she clearly fears she will be late out of the gate or even miss out completely. A chunk of the show is taken up with a discussion of her dysfunctional family background and a vivid description of her hard-as-nails sister. There’s a beautifully Long-esque verbal picture of her sister's wedding and the show ends with Long going into poetic rhapsodies about her love for her new niece.
I should add, by the way, that this show is not entirely without its politics, but it is on the cute side – who else could imagine going on a day trip with a member of UKIP and sharing sweeties? Elsewhere she celebrates arty culture with positively boundless gusto, championing long articles in the London Review of Books, Walt Whitman and Radio 3 and explaining how she doesn’t have a TV. Not that the latter is surely much of a big deal, as she clearly has access to TV programmes – elsewhere she sings the praises of Orange Is The New Black.
Of course there are some people who will be irritated by everything Josie Long does, from her funny film noir voices to her idiosyncratic punk rock handwritten programmes. But they are wrong. Long was an Edinburgh legend before Cara Josephine and this show merely underlines it, reminding us how consistently wonderful she is.
