‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” Many of us will know that bit of the quote, but not what follows: “Now is the time of monsters.” Josie Long has made a whole show out of it, combining her career-long interest in the state of the political nation with a newfound zeal for prehistoric megafauna. It’s a fine set, a candid dispatch (like all Long’s shows) from the frontline of life-as-Josie, now 43, negotiating a painful separation from the father of her kids, and deeply alarmed at the state of the world. It also deftly deploys the defunct animals conceit to excavate optimism in the millennial cycle of extinction and recovery. And optimism, as any Josie fan will tell you, is the Long game.
It starts more like early-career, scrapbook-era Long than the recent vintage, with pictures – not always easy to see – of prehistoric predators she’s sketched on flashcards. It’s a hobby, this paleolithic passion, that she’s developed with her children – whom we later meet fraying their mother’s patience with their early rises and demands to be carried, then being coached by Long in far-left politics. Other domestic snapshots include the tale of the recent concussion that changed Long’s perspective on life (including, very funnily, how she experiences the length of each second), and a near-death experience suffered by the family hamster, elsewhere to be found discussing his captivity with the house mice.
Mainly, her attention is given over to larger beasts. Every animal on Earth today, she contends, had a surprisingly larger, or smaller, ancestor. Consider the giant ground sloth, as big as an elephant; then consider what we’ve done to ourselves, removing from the environment almost all the other animals as big as we are. Long’s show toggles between dark despair (at our capacity for destruction, and by extension at “these troubled times”) and wonder, imagining a life for her family in the painted Chauvet caves, 30,000 years ago. That image contrives to be both playful and poignant in Long’s hands, in a show that ranges across territory – much as the dromornithidae and eohippus once did – that other comics seldom approach.
• At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 24 August
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