Ruminating on love leads the way to dangerous precipices in comedy.

Navel-gazing and introspective mournfulness are frequent side effects of heartbreak, neither of which bode well for laughs.

But enmeshing an unwitting audience in a public therapy session was never a risk countenanced by Josie Long’s brave new show, kept on the right side of the margins by eloquent and witty writing from a performer who admits aspirations to a poet’s heart.

Long’s own romantic despair came in 2013, when she was 29 – an age, she admits, which compounded the situation by leaving her with circles of friends settling into the marriages, homes and accessories of cemented partnerships.

The pain escalated insidiously, to the point where trips to the post office sparked desperate pangs of howling insecurity.

Seeking a chubby, ginger-bearded knight in armour, she found greater comfort in rock-climbing, to the point of recovery where, in the brief passages where she talked uncompromisingly about her fears, Long was utterly convincing.

Her indie cutesiness was still there – Bob Dylan impressions, suffocating Nigel Farage with marshmallows and the joys of electric blankets – but Long’s more powerful moments were never couched in her trademark daftness. Emotional departures are rarely visited this deftly.