Jessica Fostekew on Voyaging into Choppy Waters

My show this year is a true, utopian-horror story. What the nuts is that? Well, let's talk about it.

I’m fascinated by the fight for an ideal world. 'In an ideal world...' is the sort of thing women often say to preface a request for the bare minimum that they need.

'In an ideal world my money would show up in my account today, please?'

'There’s five of us, so IDEALLY, we’d have more than one bedroom?'

'Yes please sir, if it’s okay with you, and thanks for your time with this, but what would be PERFECT actually is nine KitKat Chunkys'

You get my point, women have to dance a dance when they’re being assertive or asking for stuff, otherwise they're ‘aggressive’ or ‘whiny'. When I hear ‘in an ideal world’, it’s that dance that comes to mind. Odd, because in a truly ideal world, it wouldn’t exist.

I think it’s right that we’re constantly swimming as hard as we can towards an ideal world, a utopia. Young, British people have just come out and voted for a more kind and less austere world. It is a hopeful thing. They’re idealists. I wonder whether the people who voted for Trump or Brexit can argue that they’re voting for a chance at a utopia? Or were they voting as a belligerent plea just to feel heard; to create change, whatever that change might be?

I want us to be striving for a best-possible-state. But I am hyper-wary, because wherever there are constructed, apparent utopias, they are often, in reality, terrifying microcosms. Take for example a cruise, or maybe a month-long comedy festival. People save up their whole lives to go on cruises; decadence and hedonism abound, out far away from the day-to-day. Endless food and fun. Some of them now have zip-wires, climbing walls and flumes on board. FLUMES.

Heaven? No; more like a luxury Alcatraz. Look into the eye of someone who has worked on a cruise and you won’t see your reflection; the shine will have gone. You will see a window into the saddest, most introspective, greediest edges of humanity.

Performers save up years to bring a show to the Edinburgh Fringe. Four weeks of partying. A bubble of total comedy immersion where careers are made. Nirvana? No. More a competition of fashionability. Look into the eye of a performer who is in their third week of their first Fringe and the shine will have gone – they will have left it in a bar called The Abattoir, where they talk to comedians about comedy for the whole time they’re not performing comedy, between breathers to Google themselves. You will see a window into the most fragile, introspective, desperate-for-visiblity and misguided-about-how-important-their-job-is edge of humanity.

If we are told we are going to a paradise then our expectations will be rocket-high, and the crash when we get under the bellies of these places is hard. Now, I will never see a cruise as anything other than a floating-torture-planet. But I do understand this festival.

It’s not a promised land, it’s a training ground. In a decade, the hugest thing I’ve learned is to only go when I have something I am desperate to share, not to become. I have educated my expectations; unlike last summer when I went away to what I thought would be the most beautiful case of having my cake and eating it, and it all became a living hell. To hear more about that, in an ideal world, you’d come and see my show, The Silence of the Nans.  

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Jessica Fostekew: The Silence of the Nans, Just the Tonic at The Caves (The Wee One), 3-26 Aug (not 14), 4pm, £5-6/PWYW