Immediately after this morning's penultimate Herald Angel awards at Edinburgh's Festival Theatre, and only a hop and a skip down the hill at the Dovecote Studios, the winners of this year's Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award will be revealed.
There is just one woman on the shortlist for each of the main and newcomer awards, Bridget Christie and Aisling Bea, but if one of them does not emerge with a trophy, once again questions will be asked.
As The Herald this year fielded an entirely female team of comedy critics, we can perhaps be excused the fact that our list of comedy Angel winners, including The Mighty Boosh, Ross Noble, Daniel Kitson and, this year, Sean Hughes, does not include many women either. It was an observation I felt bound to make at our first week's event when, Hughes apart, the list of winners was entirely dominated by women. They were to the fore again last week - the Wau Wau Sisters, Patti Smith, Alina Ibragimova, Mirenka Cechova - and woman are well represented again (see Monday's Herald for full details).
Without making any conscious decision to do so, I also found that many of the other shows I saw were entirely women's work. Excuse me for giving a few of them a last-minute plug here, lest you are looking for a recommendation for something to see this closing weekend of the Fringe.
Gemma Whelan is rightly in the running for a Stage award for her performance in Philip Ridley's Dark Vanilla Jungle, for which the much over-used word "visceral" is apt, and which is a very powerful hour exposing the nature of abandonment and abuse, which ends with our disturbed heroine desperately attaching herself to a bloke in a vegetative state. Renee Lyons, from New Zealand, told the story of a man who fought back from such a fate after a rugby accident in Nick: An Accidental Hero, and populated her stage with beautifully-drawn characters, some of them most amusingly male, in a gentler but equally accomplished performance.
Australian Hannah Gadsby, as others have observed, should surely have been on the comedy award shortlist for her brilliantly structured memoir narrative Happiness Is A Bedside Table - in a city still full of sex and stripping despite the efforts of our new national law enforcement agency, hers is a routine to remember.
I could add many more names to that short list, and can, of course, make no claim that my Fringe experience is typical, there being no such thing. Nor should it be in any way remarkable that women are making so much of the fine work around in Edinburgh this year. But it does mean that any perceived failure to recognise one sex as much as the other when the prizes are doled out will be subject to even more intense scrutiny.
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