Michael Fry: Let's forget the official Festival and concentrate on the Fringe

This year the disproportion between the two is greater than ever. On the Fringe there are 2,453 shows, at the official Festival there are 107. I can look back to the days when the Festival's shows outnumbered the Fringe's. The programme in one typical year contained 30 items on a single folding sheet: I recall it exactly because it was a year when a company of strolling players, calling themselves Zoom Cortex, slept on my floor in the Lawnmarket, occasionally copulating. Today the programme looks more like the telephone directory of a medium-sized town. I hope the behaviour of the players has not become more respectable.

What is the right analogy? The economic performance of South and North Korea, perhaps, or of West Germany and East Germany as used to be? In any event we have on the one hand something that burgeons and burgeons under its own impetus, in apparent chaos yet still showing over the years certain trends. And on the other hand we have something not wholly immobile, to be sure, yet in most respects stuck in a rut.

The Fringe is freedom, in other words, and therefore fit to face whatever the 21st century may bring. The Festival is in thrall to something - who can say what? - from the past.

Look at the shape of the Festival's programme this year. It still contains the kind of categories it had 40 years ago, only lacking in conviction. It presents operas, yet most are now concert productions, not staged but sung from a platform in the Usher Hall: your stereo at home will give you better quality. It is a long way from what Richard Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk, total work of art.

What precisely are these productions trying to bring out that would not be better available through another medium? If there is no answer, should we not in honesty advise opera buffs to go to some different city ready to put the pieces on properly? Till we can do the same in Edinburgh, perhaps we should stop putting on opera at all. Maybe we only carry on doing it, or pretending to, because no director of the Festival is brave enough to admit defeat and kill it off.

I could go on about a further Festival at the Usher Hall of Brahms and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky (and, for heaven's sake, the New World Symphony and the Enigma Variations: have they no shame, these people?). I could go on about a fresh effort to demonstrate that there is such a thing as Scottish drama (forget it - in 500 years here have been only two great Scottish plays, The Thrie Estaits and Black Watch, and probably we need to wait another 500 years for the next).

But I want to bring in the Fringe. It is above all comic: that is why people frequent the Fringe. To say so is not to downplay its serious side - after all, Black Watch first appeared on the Fringe. So did the greatest British play of the late 20th century, now renowned all over the world, Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Still, there even the tragedy was comic.

The mushrooming comic Fringe of recent decades has been not only an artistic but also a social phenomenon. It has helped to restore and confirm comedy as a central strand in national culture. I am no expert on the genesis of this revival, but I suspect that the particular genre of stand-up comedy, featuring one man or woman in face-to-face banter, part planned and part impromptu, with an audience often drunken and profane, largely owes to Edinburgh its development and its current popularity all over the country. It has reminded us there are also the good times even as we have had to hack our way through the bad times

That is what has drawn in the people to the Fringe. The official Festival has by contrast always appealed, and probably always will appeal, to a bourgeois audience, which in Edinburgh means one of conventional, not to say tedious taste. In fact even the bourgeoisie of Edinburgh has not always been demonstrative in its support of the Festival, as of anything else. The late Sir John Drummond, who was its director from 1978 to 1983, went so far as to say: ‘We are not welcome here'. But then he, like most other directors, ran the whole clanjamfray from London.

This mutual incomprehension has been reinforced by all the Festivals resting on an assumption that international high culture is everywhere the same and to be dictated by metropolitan elites. So programmes in Edinburgh will be much the same as in London or Berlin or New York.

This goes on despite the fact that the impresarios who organise programmes beyond that magic circle, in Helsinki or Prague or Budapest for example, show not the slightest hesitation in foregrounding their own Sibelius or Dvork or Bartk - while not, of course, forgetting the rest. In other words it is possible, to give it a local accent or nuance.

Unfortunately in Scotland we never had, till Jimmy MacMillan, any great composers but we still made a huge contribution to the world's music by reason of the bottomless fund of wonderful Scottish tunes. Once these were drawn to the attention of Haydn and Beethoven in the early 19th century they at once started to use them in their compositions. Yet we have never seen at the Edinburgh Festival any systematic presentation of this corpus of music, even though it is otherwise accessible in the shape of recordings by modern performers.

From the start, the assumption behind the Edinburgh Festival was that high culture had to be imported from outside. It could be brought to Edinburgh, it could be displayed to Edinburgh, but Edinburgh was never expected to do more than look on and be grateful - not, for instance, to make any contribution to high culture itself. And that is certainly one reason why the whole exercise has become increasingly sclerotic and sterile.

By contrast the Fringe has broken out of its confines of the last century, of an appeal largely to students and luvvies which allowed it to put on only 30 productions each August, some of those to the notorious empty church-halls in Morningside. Nowadays people in all walks and stations of life go to the Fringe. During these coming three weeks, I will be able to exchange tips on the best shows with taxi- drivers, hairdressers and handymen.

It helps, of course, if a show has a local accent or nuance, though self- evidently that is not essential to success. All the same, art always and everywhere draws strength from the actual world it exists in. It is for failure to do so that I suggest we should close down the Edinburgh Festival. Somehow I do not think it, or we, will feel any pain.