The road to enlightenment

Going around Edinburgh at festival time is like a road movie of contemporary culture - you're bombarded by so many striking images, ideas and experiences it's hard to make sense of them all. You just have to give in to it. At the McEwan Hall I witness a Chinese version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, reworked like a video game where everyone dies in a frenzy of martial arts. Mark Watson's play, Hotel, takes place in a real hotel in which every room is a show within a play. In another highly regarded production, Internal, the audience become participants in a kind of existential speed-dating. I spend a surreal night in the plant houses of Edinburgh's Botanic Gardens, watching luminous gramophones playing random sounds while electric fireflies buzz around the trees and a kind of pipe organ belches real flame.

The Edinburgh Festival is an intensely physical experience. With 2000 productions in more than 250 venues, getting around presents a challenge, especially as the roads are usually choked. The secret is to go by bicycle, though it pays to remember where you leave the damn thing. In week three I mislay my wheels and suffer several days of missed-appointment misery. Edinburgh is by far the world's biggest arts festival, a cultural feeding frenzy during which the city's population doubles. In recent years there has been mounting anxiety about how long this growth can continue before the Festival collapses under its own weight. Many feared that 2009 might be the year when the whole thing began running out of cultural energy. Last year's ticketing fiasco, when the Fringe box office crashed, felt like it might be the beginning of the end for a morbidly obese festival. Then there's been the economic recession, swine flu, the tram chaos, and competition from the upstart Manchester International Festival threatening to steal Edinburgh's cultural crown. But disaster hasn't happened. Astonishingly, the Edinburgh Festival seems to have bounced back more dramatically than the stock market. Fringe ticket sales are around 20% up on 2007, which was its best year to date. Overall sales have increased by almost a third, and the International, Fringe, Book and Art festivals have more than held their own and are dragging Edinburgh out of recession.

Partly, this is down to the new professional organisation of the Fringe, which has reinvented itself after last year's near-death experience. Its headquarters now occupy the vast concourse of Edinburgh University's Appleton Tower. "Fringe Central" feels a bit like an airport departure lounge: performers, administrators and journalists all guzzling coffee and muffins and preparing for the next flight of fancy. But while the Fringe has been a commercial success, this festival hasn't really taken off artistically. There have been no stand-out Fringe productions, like Riot Group or Aurora Nova's physical theatre of past festivals; there's been no Black Watch moment or indeed anything at all from the National Theatre of Scotland.

But the critics aren't complaining. Aficionados such as the celebrated cultural writer, Joyce MacMillan, the Guardian's Mark Fisher and Neil Cooper of the Herald insist that the general standard has been reassuringly high, despite the absence of lofty peaks. The productions staged under the Made In Scotland label - part-financed by the Scottish government's Expo Fund - have been particularly well received, including Year Of The Horse about the late Sunday Herald cartoonist, Harry Horse, and Nic Green's feminist-revivalist Trilogy, by The Arches at St Stephens.

There has also been great excitement about the free festivals that have sprung up. The Forest Fringe in Bristo Place, an elegantly decrepit church hall owned by Edinburgh University, is a kind of 1960s "arts lab" where experimental theatre groups put on shows for nothing. In one piece, House, audience members are invited to smash up the furniture in a home and recreate it. Last time I passed, a guy in a top hat was playing an exploding piano mounted on bicycle wheels.

Neil Cooper believes the Forest Fringe shows that the Edinburgh Festival is capable of re-inventing itself and that the "stranglehold" of the big comedy venues is being broken. "There's a real sense of rediscovery, of excitement, applying some of the radical ideas from outside the mainstream that made the Festival Fringe so vibrant 30 years ago," he says.

Free theatre, however, remains a marginal force, since it is incapable of mounting the big-budget productions that keep the Festival in the international running. There have been markedly fewer foreign productions on this year's Fringe, perhaps due to the recession, or because Edinburgh faces greater international competition. But Mike Russell insists Edinburgh is still "the cultural capital of the world in August". To prove it, the culture minister has taken to the book festival stage himself for a show devoted to his favourite poetry. And no, it wasn't all Burns. There was Pablo Neruda in there along with Russian poet Anna Akhmetova and even a dash of Tennyson. No-one can deny that Mike Russell has a cultural hinterland. And while he has no formal responsibility for the Edinburgh festivals, everyone I meet seems to think he is good news - though Joyce MacMillan says his recent suggestion that the Fringe is getting too big shows that "he doesn't understand the first thing" about what makes it so dynamic.

But the size issue simply won't go away. Festival-goers complain that they simply can't find their way around Edinburgh. Even critics like Fisher concede that the festival's sheer scale makes it difficult for individual shows to achieve critical mass. Edinburgh University has become almost a festival city within a city: a giant purple cow dominates Bristo Square. You could spend three weeks at the Pleasance complex without exhausting its programme.

Everywhere you are assaulted by performers telling you they are the funniest people on the planet. But Joyce MacMillan dismisses as "absolute tosh" any suggestion that comedy has overwhelmed the Fringe. And it's true that to limit the Fringe, or impose overall quality control, would undermine its spontaneity and dynamism. No-one curates the Fringe and no-one subsidises it - apart from a pittance from the council. Anyone who wants to put on a show in Edinburgh can hire a venue and show the world what they've got - even if it's just a dose of self-delusion. The Fringe is the ultimate cultural free market.

But the trouble with free markets is that money talks and those that have the most shout the loudest and get the most attention. The Fringe has been colonised by a handful of big commercial comedy-oriented venues which spend a fortune on promotion and charge ever-higher rates, despite no guarantee of quality. One critically acclaimed comedy show, John Gordillo's F***onomics, was so excruciatingly unfunny I was desperate to leave after five minutes.

The future of comedy must surely be more along the lines of that shown at The Stand, Edinburgh's leading year-round comedy venue. This venue has soul - a sweaty basement reeking of beer is surely the correct atmosphere for edgy comedy. Proprietor Tommy Sheppard keeps ticket prices low, ensuring people get value for money and performers aren't ripped off.

Curated festivals-within-festivals, such as Made In Britain, the British Council showcase, and Forest Fringe, may equally be the future for theatre in Edinburgh. The Art Festival really came in from the cold this year, or so I'm told; the only thing I managed to catch was the RSA's Discovering Spain and a few things at the Dean Gallery. The Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) has of course, been adroitly quality-controlled for nine years by director Catherine Lockerbie. Possibly the most emotional event on the festival circuit was her leaving party: instead of a clock she got a poem from poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, performed live and supported by a trumpet player.

Lockerbie has made the book festival one of the biggest in the world, and a great commercial success. But there is a view that, like the Edinburgh Festival as a whole, it is becoming too genteel, too old, too safe. People say it lacks controversy and doesn't attract any really big-name authors, any show-stoppers. However, I don't advise you to say this to Ian Rankin, who'll tell you in no uncertain terms that the EIBF's great achievement has been to hold onto its roots. It has kept celebrity culture at bay and avoided becoming, like Hay-on-Wye, a part of the corporate entertainment industry. Point taken. But my own experience of fronting EIBF events is that audience-wise, the book festival has been growing older faster than I am, and I'm the wrong side of 50.

There's nothing wrong with a literary Glastonbury for the over-50s, of course.The International Festival is similarly mature - the average age of the audience at the opening concert, Handel's Judas Maccabaeus, must have been touching 60. Older people read books and newspapers and still vote in elections and they can be very combative, as author and Times columnist, David Aaronovitch, discovered at a session I chaired. He was taken to task on everything from Iraq to the assassination of JFK and emerged shell-shocked but exhilarated.

But Edinburgh can't afford to cater to only one section of the community and it needs young blood. EIF's Australian-born director, Johathan Mills, is certainly doing his bit to broaden the festival's appeal with productions such as Faust, which made a nonsense of the whole debate about high and low art. You could take it on so many levels: from soft porn to moral philosophy, depending upon whether you followed the surtitles or not (it was in Romanian). Or as someone in Ingliston put it: "With tits and a text from Goethe you can't really go wrong." Increasingly, EIF productions, like the Traverse's Last Witch or Michael Clark's choreographing of David Bowie's music, appeal to the same audiences as attend the Fringe comedy factories. The old boundaries no longer apply, and this cultural convergence should attract a wider audience. Next year, for the first time, all festival tickets will be available from one outlet: a profound culture change, which means from the punter's perspective, all the Edinburgh festivals - Art, Book, International, Fringe - will eventually be as one. But if the Fringe already dominates by virtue of its size, will putting the other festivals under its roof dilute their identities even further? Not so long as the work is up to standard.

The great unanswered question on this year's festival circuit is what impact the new arts agency, Creative Scotland, will have on Scotland's cultural life. Six months ago, 400 artists and opposition MSPs signed a petition calling for the new body, created by merging the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, to be scrapped. Mike Russell inherited the plan for the agency to oversee the entire creative sector - "from video games to the highest in fine arts", as he puts it - and whatever his initial views he is an evangelist for reconciling "the creative forces with the forces of commerce". That kind of talk worries people in the arts world, who fear dumbing down and commercialisation. The appointment of a former banker, Ewan Brown of Lloyds TSB, as chair of Creative Scotland, provoked another bout of cultural paranoia.

However, Russell seems to have persuaded at least the commentariat that his intentions are honourable; that he wants Creative Scotland to facilitate the creative process rather than dictate it and that a streamlined, all-purpose arts agency makes sense. The Expo Fund, set up two years ago by the Scottish government to provide an extra £2m to promote Scottish work, has built confidence in the arts world. The fund was not used by the SNP, as some feared, to promote a parochial tartan kailyard, but has financed outward-looking productions of international quality, as the Made In Scotland showcase confirms.

The mutual trust that has developed between Russell and the arts community could be good news for Edinburgh's future. That mind-blowing Faust answered many questions about where the Festival is going in its 63rd year. Firstly, Edinburgh is still the boss: where else could you see a play involving 100 actors in a barn the size of an aircraft hanger? Faust could have been an embarrassing flop - Addams Family Values meets Night Of The Living Dead. But it wasn't. Jonathan Mills has a feel for the spectacular and the self-confidence to pull off real theatrical coups. By common agreement, this is the year he finally arrived. The Ingliston Walpurgis also confirmed that Edinburgh's relationship to its festivals has changed beyond all recognition. Until recently, a production like this, featuring necromancy, bestiality and paedophilia, would have had the city fathers frothing in disgust. Even I shifted uneasily in my seat when a group of 11-year-old angels entered the carnival of lust, one of them to be raped by Faust. But it is almost impossible to shock anyone nowadays. And the city no longer sees the Festival as an alien intrusion of international pornographers. Incredibly, the majority of tickets at the Fringe are sold to citizens of greater "Embra".

This local identification has given the Festival a secure financial base and allowed it to sail through the recession. It no longer depends on a footloose international cultural elite, and remains the greatest show on Earth. The Edinburgh Festival is a cultural and economic resource of immense importance to Scotland as we struggle to find a role in the post-industrial age. Aside from the £200 million it contributes in direct spending, it presents the opportunity to build a society based on intellectual and artistic endeavour: a society of the mind and a society of the soul. The theme of this year's EIF was Scotland's Enlightenment. It could be that the new enlightenment starts here.