The Festival
Reviewed by Andrew Moreton 28-May-14
An epic journey across The Festival, as three children head out to explore…
Gnarled old hedge monkeys, yurt dwellers and anarchos, though divided on many things, look back nostalgically to when festivals were festivals, if you knowwhaimean? A time when a festival was an adventure.
Back then before you could even watch Hawkwind you had to find the field, fight the police and have your money and drugs taken off you by the Hells Angels.
The modern experience, the new, quintessentially English small festival, as featured in even a Washing Powder Ad, can seem a far more anodyne affair, with its more carefully marshalled experience and family friendly face painting and papier-mache workshops. A far, far more pleasant experience to be sure, but not what you’d call an adventure.
Jazz Greenhill’s wonderful short piece The Festival, set in fields that host the event, glints with adventure, though of a very discreet and minor kind.
A family park up at a rural festival, put up their tents. The grown-ups have decided that the children, Ari, Rob and Lynda, should go to bed early on the first night of the festival but they have other plans and sneak out to explore.
Their journey leads around unmapped tent cities and mysterious woods filled with art. They spot exotic natives, climb giant dinosaurs, find lost treasure and discover a ‘huge woodstock hippy party’, and experience some mishaps, before making their epic return to camp.
Greenhill’s children see the Festival through innocents’ wide eyes, and she paints the Festival, and its creatures, as a magical, tantalising vision of the world as it might be – fantastic, mysterious, tribal.
The kids’ perspectives, emotionally and visually, ring utterly true. They’re at that odd juncture towards the last moments of childhood – smart and self-aware, but dwarfed by adults and their inexperience in the world – and Greenhill’s gift for subtle characterisation plays to this perfectly.
It’s a fairly slight comic, but it’s paced just right. It came out last year, but you can get, just in time for this year’s festival season, from Avery Hill Publishing.