Of course it is. It's more than a festival, it's where the nation gathers to bare its soul.

Last year, thanks to an invitation from one of the sponsors, I attended the National Arts Festival for the first time since the 1990s. My previous visit had been in a year of personal creative flourishing (compounded by the energy of relative youth); that year, I was involved in several productions, including a student show, a musical I'd written and a David Mamet two-hander.

Even with all that going on, I also saw plenty of shows and made time for after-midnight chats with my idols, often on the grimy, beer-stained carpet of that legendary hotel. The shenanigans were real, though the details are vague.

So much has changed since then. Mamet is now persona non grata, Grahamstown is now Makhanda, and it's been almost three decades since I sang on stage (much to the relief of anyone unlucky enough to have heard it happen).

The festival itself has also gone through multiple iterations of change.

Profound change.

So much change in fact that, last year, I expected to arrive to a ghost town populated by out-of-pocket B&B owners, broke theatre-makers crying at the entrances of empty venues, miniature dust bowl twirling through the streets.

There'd been so much negative...