BUTT

a chronicle of how the festivals have expanded, sometimes by force, our collective imagination. In 2009 we went to Amsterdam to interview Hans Teeuwen, the Dutch comedian whose equal-opportunities baiting of minorities made him quite the man about town. Fast forward to 2018 and we interviewed the team behind Queens of Sheba, a play which placed the voices of women of colour centre stage. They baited every bit as much as the Dutchman, and enlightened much more. Looking back, it feels like revelation in too-slow motion. The exciting bit, though: that process continues both this year and the next.

If there’s a constant, though, it’s the delight in re-reading, year in year out, some stone cold bangers. There are, inevitably, favourites. Some of those stick out as superb pieces of writing. Junta Sekimori’s 2008 essay on his one-night transition to a Ladyboy of Bangkok was both colourful and utterly, beautifully sensitive about a form of gender play that’s an art form and not a joke. That Bo Burnham piece, in which Jonathan Liew (now a Guardian sports writer) walked around Edinburgh with the boy with six million YouTube views and no one noticed. Fern Brady – then an aspiring writer, now a fully aspired comic – on her first standup gig, done as a piece of gonzo journalism.

And some of that delight is in the way that our criticism has alternately chased, followed, overlooked and seen so clearly the restless currents of creativity at the festivals. Bouncy Castle Dracula deserved all one of those stars for charging 2008 audiences nine pounds for a student piss about. “Languid arrogance” remains a great way of summarising a theatrical crime, though “slag heap theatre” is perhaps not how we’d aim our lances now. More than ever this year, with artists re-emerging from a painful cold storage, we’ll be recognising the emotional cost of artistic endeavour, while still trying to make judgements about its artistic quality.

On a personal note, I’ll step back as editor of Fest this year – the dignified retreat of a sub-cub journalist on a magazine whose professionalism has grown far beyond love of the arts and criticism. Those issues have gone back in the box, perhaps never to be flicked through again. That’s no bad thing. It’s cute to mark anniversaries and look back. This restless, relentless colony of festivals which occupy Edinburgh every summer have always encapsulated the present, and heralded the future. Fest will be right on its tail.

“There’s no one else we’d rather watch onstage”

PENN & TELLER