Theatre pioneer attacks Fringe

Criticism of the Edinburgh Festival heightened yesterday when one of the city's best-known arts entrepreneurs attacked the state of the Fringe. This followed the anxieties expressed earlier by Professor George Steiner that the Festival had lost its sense of purpose.

Yesterday, Richard Demarco, one of the founders of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, the country's first fringe theatre, lamented the decline in quality of the city's Fringe Festival and its increasing domination by stand-up comedians.

At a debate on the role of the 50-year-old Edinburgh Festival in the next millennium he said: "In the old days 90 per cent of what was on at the Fringe was of high quality. Now there are hundreds, even thousands, of theatrical events but the fact is that you cannot be sure everything will be good.

"There has also been a terrible increase in the number of stand-up comics. There are so many it has become an infestation which is impossible to keep out. I've loved comedy all my life, but I want to see more of a balance between comedy and tragedy in the Fringe."

Mr Demarco, who is showing the first British exhibition of the work of the ex-convict sculptor Jimmy Boyle for 12 years, said there was also a danger that the visual arts would become totally eradicated from the Festival.

Major exhibitions ofVelazquez and Giacometti were being given the same status in the Fringe Festival programme as other, more minor shows. "That is ridiculous," he told the audience at the Demarco European Art Foundation.

The organisers must also take more trouble to encourage performers from places such as Bosnia, Romania and Russia, he said. "So many of the hundreds of millions of people who were cut off from us in the Cold War earn $40 a month. Unless they are famous, how on earth [can they] afford to come here? And how are they going to come here if all we can give them is a small space?"

John Calder, the Scottish publisher who was also involved in the founding of the Traverse in the early 1960s in a bid to retain the Festival spirit in Edinburgh all year round, said the Festival was under-promoted.

"It's amazing how little the Festival is known around the world and I think the Scottish Tourist Office does an extremely bad job in publicising it. There's something wrong with Edinburgh in that it's still a secret. People who come here love it but not enough people know about it."

In future, he believed, the Fringe would expand to include more performances of opera and ballet. As subsidies continue to be drastically cut people will have to find ways of raising their own money, often under impossible conditions. The arts in the future are going to be about basic simplicity and they will have to work out how to accomplish this."

But Mr Demarco added that in its previous half-century, the annual Festival had done much to change the Scots' dour tendencies and their "Knoxian Presbyterian prejudice against anything which gave one a smile".

"The Festival has somehow, little by little, relaxed that. The Scotsman may be full of people writing letters saying, 'Why don't they clean up the beaches instead of throwing money away on the arts', but underneath it all they can now afford to face the fact that life can be about joy."