Edinburgh Festival news, features and reviews

I wish everybody could discover culture as I did in 1974. Or maybe 1975. After three decades of wear and tear on the old grey matter, the years merge in the memory. Either way, try this. Travel to Edinburgh on the night-train. Arrive at about 5.30 on a typical Scottish summer morning: thick fog, thermometer hovering around zero, steady rain. Sleepless, soaked and sozzled, stagger into Princes Street.

And then rub your eyes in disbelief. Down by the bandstand, two dozen eerie figures seem to be performing what looks and sounds strangely like Shakespeare. It can't be, can it? With rucksack still strapped to your back, creep closer. Unmistakeable phrases come drifting across the flowerbeds. “So foul and fair a day I have not seen ... this place is too cold for hell.”

Before you can nod in agreement, notice that you are being approached by a young woman with an alarmingly enthusiastic grin. “Hi,” she trills. “Welcome to the University of North-East Utah's continuous all-night performance of Macbeth. If you enjoy this show try to catch The Bacchae with Buttocks - our hilarious version of Euripides. That's at 8am.”

Sex, alcohol and going to the Edinburgh Festival were the three great rites of passage in my student days. Admittedly, my student days now seem so remote that the entire era will probably soon be kicked off the GCSE history curriculum, like the Tudors, in favour of more Hitler. Nowadays, if you haven't qualified in sex and alcohol well before you go to secondary school, you are probably given remedial tuition - or at least weekly check-ups by a social worker.

But going to the Edinburgh Festival? That, at least, remains a mandatory milestone for enlightened college students on the path from innocence to depravity. And one that leaves an indelible mark on the memory and personality. Not an August has gone by, in the three decades since my dawn epiphany in foggy Princes Street Gardens, when I haven't felt a strange surge of excitement as the thousands of jugglers, pipers, fiddlers, hoofers, crooners and jokers converge once more on Auld Reekie, and Edinburgh's vast, anarchic, sprawling and mind-bogglingly diverse cultural jamboree springs into life again.

Of course the Edinburgh experience has altered beyond recognition. For a start, the city in the 1970s was still a prim Presbyterian fortress where the pubs shut at 10.30pm and didn't open at all on Sundays. Even finding a restaurant prepared to risk eternal hellfire by serving you food on the Sabbath was a chancy business.

The festival in those days was also very different. It was still quite contained, orderly and Establishment-led - much more like the staid “Salzburg of the North” that its founders had envisaged back in 1947. Even the Fringe was dominated by Oxbridge types in ties. Shocks were few and far between. But they did cause genuine outrage, not the simulated “furores” so often faked these days. When, in the 1960s, a Fringe producer dared to include a brief nude scene in a show, he and the actress concerned were prosecuted for indecency. That seems unbelievable now. Bouncing boobs and waggling willies are practically de rigueur on the 2008 Fringe.

But that's not even the biggest change. What most alarms old festival-watchers such as me is the rise of the comedy mafia. For several years now the Fringe has been dominated by chillingly ambitious stand-up comics who monopolise the top venues (which, this year, have set themselves up as a kind of “premier league” alliance to maximise their clout), charge West End prices, employ retinues of pushy publicists to beat off the opposition, and treat the festival merely as a stepping-stone to TV fame. One wouldn't mind so much if they also managed to be funny.

How different it all was in 1947. “May I assure you,” wrote Sir John Falconer, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, in the first festival brochure, “that this festival is not a commercial undertaking in any way.” Rather, he went on, it aimed to promote “a new way of life centred round the arts”. Audiences could “refresh their souls and reaffirm their belief in things other than material”.

There will be an estimated 1,500 newspaper and magazine journalists writing about Edinburgh in the next few weeks. (Yes, 1,500! The First World War was covered by fewer.) Among them will be many who will laugh cynically at those quaint, idealistic and perhaps condescending sentences. But I'm not one of them. For me, the abiding allure of Edinburgh is that, despite all those ghastly stand-ups, despite the crass commercialisation of so many Fringe venues, despite the hype, the manufactured “scandals” and the empty pretentiousness of many of the shows, the festival has indeed lived up to the Lord Provost's lofty aspirations. It does refresh the soul. It does reaffirm one's belief in “things other than material”. And that's a lot harder to do today, when materialism is the dominant driving force in society, than it was in the food-rationed, bomb-cratered Britain of 1947.

But has the festival helped to establish “a new way of life centred round the arts”? Even its loudest cheerleaders would probably not claim that. And yet ... for one month each year an entire city abandons itself to the creative arts and all who practise them. This involves welcoming hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world, most of them highly exuberant, highly demonstrative, highly intoxicated (much of the time) and in their teens or early twenties. It sounds like a recipe for a riot. If this were a football competition, it would be.

Yet nobody gets stabbed, kicked, beaten up or bludgeoned. Hardly anyone gets angry. There's a manic atmosphere, it's true, and plenty of noisy disputes. But they are triggered by the vast passions for art, entertainment and thrilling spectacle that swirl round every dark crag and cranny of this majestic city at festival time. As an argument for the civilising power of art, the Edinburgh Festival still takes some beating.

That's my view, anyway. And even after 33 years (or is it 34?) I wouldn't miss it for the world. Mind you, I can't afford to get there on the sleeper any more.

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