Inside the ‘secret’ comedy festival where Stewart Lee and Nish Kumar ‘make a mess’
High up on a Welsh hillside, there’s a dinky version of the Hollywood sign. MACHYNLLETH, it says, in chunky white letters five feet tall. The Tinseltown version may be nine times that size, but bigger doesn’t always mean better.
That’s the philosophy of the “secret” Machynlleth Comedy Festival, too, which for 13 years has been defiantly low-key – with minimal advertising, no prizes, no press, and no showcases for comedy industry suits. As a result, it’s every stand-up’s favourite festival. Stewart Lee, Sarah Millican and Mark Watson are among the stars who’ve descended on these bunting-lined streets in past years, while last weekend featured The Mash Report’s Nish Kumar and Strictly’s Jayde Adams.
“It started out as a group of mates,” says Henry Widdicombe, who founded the festival in 2010. He doesn’t aim to book famous performers. The idea is to “foster alternative voices” at the start of their careers, but they often come back “in five, 10 years’ time, when they’re household names – we’ve got that working relationship with them”. The first year gave a stage to James Acaster, Nick Helm, Isy Suttie, Josie Long and Widdicombe’s brother, The Last Leg host Josh Widdicombe – who were “largely a bunch of open-mic comedians” at the time.
Hugged by the Powys hills, Machynlleth has just two main streets, meeting at a whimsical Gothic clock-tower. Yet, despite its size, it’s a cultural hub, home to half a dozen independent bookshops and the MoMA Wales art museum.
Finding venues in a small town takes a bit of imagination: stand-ups have performed in a mine shaft, a sweet shop, and a floating shed on an estuary. There’s an annual gig in a railway shed only reachable by steam train. In the local bowling club, I watched musical comedy duo Foxdog Studios – imagine a high-tech Flight of the Conchords – playing in costumes covered in screens and wires, risking electrocution as they staggered dangerously close to an onstage tank of water.
In a grade II listed Georgian mansion, I joined a hundred children laughing at laconic French raconteur Marcel Lucont (the creation of character comic Alexis Dubus). He urged audiences to vote for “the worst child” in his award-winning gameshow Les Enfants Terribles, with points awarded for “ignorance” and “running with scissors”.
It’s a place for the weird and wonderful – “a space for failure”, in Widdicombe’s words, where comics let their hair down, and try things that might not work. Avant-garde absurdist Ben Target was clearly pulling his fans’ legs in calling his gig this year “The Super Commercial Mega Mainstream Entertainment Show”.
“In order to get something good, you need the freedom to make a mess,” says Nish Kumar. Why is Machynlleth special? Because it’s where the mess happens. Most of the shows are billed as “work in progress”. As a result, it draws a particular crowd: “people who are enthused and excited by the idea of watching [comedians] work out material. That isn’t for everybody and I can completely understand why,” Kumar says. “I’ve looked out at the audience of my own show and thought, ‘What the f---are these people doing? I’ve not finished these jokes!’ But comedy, unlike a lot of art forms, requires a bit of audience feedback.”
Ultimately, “it’s a festival by comedy nerds for comedy nerds”, says Kumar. “With music, there’s some people who like putting on the radio and listening to whatever music is on, and some people who obsessively trawl record shops for The Fall B-sides.” Machynlleth is for the B-side hunters.
And some of the B-sides are hilarious. “I don’t think anyone will ever again see James Acaster performing as drunk as he did here about five years ago,” says Kumar. “It was an incredible set. It ended in this sort of free-love happening – he was trying to get the crowd all to touch each other’s butts! But in a consensual way.” Acaster was back this weekend, testing a version of what will become his next UK tour show.
“I wanted to build something that would be the antithesis of the Edinburgh Fringe,” says Widdicombe. He was disillusioned by Edinburgh’s “pressure-cooker environment” – the “financial pressure, awards pressure, critical pressure”, and the emphasis on “growth at all costs”. In recent years, performers’ complaints have been growing louder about Edinburgh’s soaring venue and accommodation costs. The festival is, perhaps, just too big for the city that hosts it. Machynlleth is a model for a more laid-back way of doing things.
“In the first few years, they sort of looked at us wondering what was going on, and assuming it was never going to work,” says Widdicombe. But the festival’s now very popular with locals, and brings a million pounds a year to the Welsh economy. This year is the largest yet – with 8,000-plus visitors – but he says to grow it any further “would lose what’s magical about it”. There’s no push to bring more visitors: if anything, they’d rather keep it secret.
One thing that helps prevent word getting out is that people struggle to get the actual word out. “Machynlleth” doesn’t roll easily off the English tongue. Chris Cantrill (of Yorkshire sketch duo The Delightful Sausage) greeted fans on Friday with the immortal line: “It’s great to be here in Ma… uh… April.”
Details: machcomedyfest.co.uk
