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There are times, often late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, and often at The Long Table, when Grahamstown feels like a massive love-fest.

You look around and everyone is laughing, smiling, deep in conversation. Performers, directors and designers are congratulating each other on their shows and also giving insightful, constructive advice. This little world becomes a stage upon which we all strut our stuff, our hearts full of meaning, beating upon our sleeves.

But, as always, the converse exists. Fest is also hard and demanding. And I’m not just talking about the hangovers. For ten, now 15, days, we stretch ourselves to the limit. Theatre makers and audience alike. We live together in a rarefied atmosphere, transported into art, ideas and expression. We forget to eat, drink too much, smoke too much, sleep too little, sometimes love a little too much, and work harder than we possibly ever do at any other time of year. The performers work at their art, the audience work at understanding, and everyone is in it together.

The reason we come back every year – theatre makers particularly – is very likely due to a collective amnesia.

We forget the demands and choose to remember rewards. Forget the nights when only five people sat in the audience, and remember the applause. Forget the hangovers and remember only those sublime moments of complete understanding and good will.

Festival is a terrifying prospect for the makers of theatre. Your work is suddenly thrown into relief by hundreds of others. Who wants to have an audience see Conor Lovett in The Beckett Trilogies and then come watch your 60 minutes of light comedy which you threw together in desperation and haste six weeks prior?

The audience grows ever more demanding, the reviewers ever tougher as, even subconsciously, they start comparing what they’ve seen. But theatre makers are tough, thank the gods, and can roll with the punches, coming back time and again in search of that standing ovation, that packed house, that word of praise from someone whose opinion is highly valued. And for the informed feedback.

I don’t think there is any conference, any programme designed by bigwigs, any confabulation of talking heads that can do for theatre in South Africa what the National Arts Fest does. In this bowl between the hills in the rural, impoverished Eastern Cape, hundreds of artists are teaching each other, talking to each other, inspiring each other, hatching plans together. They leave and they put those lessons into practice, practice, practice, to come again and put on a show, to again create magic in a particular time, in a particular place.

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