In a far-flung corner of mid-Wales, Jessica Fostekew is bringing her Iconic Breath tour to the Machynlleth Comedy Festival. Liz Morrison is charmed by the comedian both onstage and off.
Each year, Machynlleth Comedy Festival (Gŵyl Gomedi Machynlleth) enlists a variety of unique community venues across the Powys town to act as stages for a smorgasbord of talent aimed at dedicated comedy fans.
Taking to these stages are the best part of a hundred performers, comprising a remarkably packed weekend schedule. Some of them use the festival as a testing ground to experiment with works in progress and/or hone new material ahead of the Edinburgh Fringe later in the summer.
The event also draws in gigs from faces known not just from the circuit, but from shows like QI, Taskmaster and various Radio 4 comedy shows. Jessica Fostekew fits this bill, and as the English standup and comedy writer approaches the end of her Iconic Breath tour, she’s making a detour to Mach – performing that ‘standard’ set (which is the one I catch) on Saturday afternoon and following that up the next day with a more embryonic one, to be titled either Fettle or Kettle.
The Iconic Breath show takes place in one of the festival’s best-known venues – a converted Welsh chapel known locally as The Machynlleth Tabernacle, packed to the rafters in a way churches don’t tend to be these days. The church style seating creates a congregational atmosphere as Jess takes the audience on a journey with her through the various social echelons she moves in – from the volunteers and competitors at weightlifting competitions, to the sweary football mums on the under-11s sidelines, to the kind of people who are in awe at the mention of collapsible bike helmets (it’s a thing).
But in this tiny corner of Wales, where the mountains meet the sea and community is still tight, Jess is raising some important questions: in a world of social media, calamitous opinions and widespread intolerance, have we lost the ability to identify as ‘not’ something?
While modern life has broadened our exposure to the world, has it also narrowed our capacity to listen and to see life from another person’s point of view? Have we collectively lost the tolerance that comes from the overlapping into other people’s lives and positioned ourselves in a fixed ‘one tribe’ mentality?
Machynlleth is an interesting place to make this social observation – a rural market town home to over 2,000 residents, aside from the May Bank Holiday weekend each year when Comedy Festival visitors swell its population to nearer 8,000. This is a transient crowd, as all festival crowds are; Hay Festival is a high-profile local point of comparison, as is the Brecon Jazz Festival at the height of its popularity.
It’s definitely providing an escape from the realities of the times we currently find ourselves living in – or, as Jess puts it while onstage, “It’s a particularly discombobulating time to be in the world. A time of monsters and egos.”
And that matters because these monsters and egos need to be called out in places such as popular bank holiday weekend comedy festivals. Since the times of Ancient Greece, comedy has targeted gods, politicians and social norms; passing this mantle of perspective to jesters of the royal court, then vaudevillian caricatures and the standups of the 20th century and our present one.
After Jess’ Iconic Breath set, I chatted to her backstage, where the conversation quickly drifted beyond comedy and performance into the strange ranklings of contemporary life. Jess was thoughtfully frank – much in the way her standup often is – and it’s clear that the ideas running through this show are not simply stage constructs, but questions she is genuinely wrestling with offstage too.
And if Jessica Fostekew is liable to find her tribe anywhere, a packed Mach Comedy Festival in the vivid green wilds of Wales seems a good place to start. To that end, you can next catch her in Wales in the comedy tent at August’s Green Man Festival. You can also join her mailing list to find out about her other upcoming work.
Jessica Fostekew, Machynlleth Comedy Festival, Sat 2 May
words LIZ MORRISON
