And Paul Daniels too

After sorting through its mass of leaflets, you'll find the world's largest arts festival has plenty of gems, writes Deirdre Falvey

Edinburgh last week was bursting at its beautiful seams with six simultaneous festivals and about a million extra visitors. The usual statistics were trotted out about how long it would take to see all the shows (something like six months, or three years; a long time, anyway). The Edinburgh festivals combine to make this the world's biggest arts festival. As well as the Edinburgh International Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe there are the book, jazz and film festivals, plus the military tattoo at the castle and, somewhere, apparently, a festival of erotica - though nobody I met seemed able to locate it.

There have also been the mandatory festival rows. There was outrage that no women made the shortlist for the Perrier Comedy Award, that one nominee, Reginald D. Hunter, was allegedly misogynistic and that only one nominee, Howard Read, was British (the winner was the American Demetri Martin). Janet Street-Porter, the shrill media harpy, had leek-wavers picketing her one-woman show after she made acerbic comments about the Welsh (even though she's half-Welsh herself), and I witnessed a wonderful public spat between the playwright Mark Ravenhill and Councillor Steven Cardownie, the city's deputy lord provost (described as Edinburgh's festival tsar) in front of a roomful of British Council Showcase guests when the latter took exception to the former's stance on Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq.

But that kind of thing is merely the sideshow to the main events. I saw some terrific shows, including Fiona Shaw having enormous fun in Chekhov's The Seagull; a touching, funny and dynamic production featuring actors with disabilities; a wildly funny take on Little Red Riding Hood; several excellent new dramas; bewildering and frankly daft performance art; and some fine Irish comedy, including a storming Dara O Briain and a gently reflective Ian McPherson. All this and more, including former prime-time TV god Paul Daniels schlepping his tired old butt around Edinburgh in search of a new and younger audience (the canny old trouper succeeded, too).

Because there is so much going on, all anyone can get to see involves pinning a tail on the donkey a few times. The other striking thing about the fringe festival, is that it is not curated in the same way as other festivals (although some venues programme their spaces) but a free-for-all - or, more likely, a costly-for-all for the artists involved. One of those spaces is the magnificent Famous Spiegeltent, a sister of which is coming to Dublin this autumn for the fringe and theatre festivals. The Edinburgh fringe is a sort of giant trade fair where performers and artists from all over the world come to show their wares, hoping to win fame and fortune; for the comedians, particularly, there's a blatant bid for television stardom. This mostly involves a large financial investment - renting venues, paying for accommodation, printing flyers and hiring people to distribute them can be expensive - and much hoping.

Walk down the Royal Mile and you're besieged by flyers touting their star ratings from the various publications, excerpts from performances on mini-stages to drum up business and street performers of every hue - such as Bendy Em, who declared she was one of the world's few female contortionists before folding herself into a 17-inch-square glass box.

The British Council Showcase is closer to an actual trade fair. Running all last week, it involves the British Council inviting about 200 delegates - mostly promoters, festival directors and the like - from more than 60 countries to see a selection of small and mid-size theatre shows with an emphasis on innovation. The delegates can talk to the companies involved and generally do business.

One of the council-sponsored shows was Kaite O'Reilly's Peeling, presented by Graeae, a strong and quirky story that links the mythic and the personal. The three actors, in huge crinolines, form the chorus for a production of The Trojan Women ("right-on extras stuck at the back while the real actors get on with the real play"), and the action links their interaction and experience with the war stories and awful choices faced by the mothers in the Greek play.

The actors accomplish the difficult feat of making you feel sorry for the characters they play but not for the actors themselves (one deaf, one an amputee, the other a wheelchair-using dwarf), and signing and surtitling are incorporated perfectly and intelligently, never as adjuncts. Confident, important and engaging, the production comes to the Project arts centre in Dublin in October and is well worth seeing.

The People Next Door was the premiere of Henry Adam's new play: top-notch contemporary drama that's relevant, sparkily written and very funny. Bound up with questions of identity in a changing world that encroaches on personal space, Fraser Ayres plays a wonderfully endearing 25-year-old half-Asian layabout whose gentle X-Box and spliff-centric life is turned upside-down post September 11th when a psychotic policeman tries to involve him in tracking down his long-lost half-brother, who is a suspected terrorist. The other two characters are a sensitive black teenager and a crusty old Scottish widow. This generation-straddling work was outstanding in terms of skill, entertainment value and sheer style.

At the other end of the spectrum was An Audience With Paul Daniels. The confident showman, now wearing a slightly tatty, crumpled linen suit, answered questions about his magic and career, working in lots of tricks - and some impressive hypnotism. It was skilful, old-fashioned showbiz schmaltz from a former TV star looking in the doorway of another world. The lovely Debbie McGee even made a brief appearance, helping to gather props after the show had finished.

A comedy show such as Count Arthur Strong's The Greatest Story Ever Told demonstrated the limitations of character comedy. Steve Delaney's character is a self-important faded academic and a very funny creation, all strangulated vowels and pompous anecdotes. The trouble is that there's nowhere for him to go and it doesn't sustain a full show.

One feature this year was the number of comics turned thesps. Kings Of The Road by Brian McAvera was a sentimental tale set around three generations of busmen in Northern Ireland. The three-hander's best performance was from the comedian Michael Smiley; his fellow comic Ed Byrne and the veteran actor James Ellis played his son and father. But the script isn't really a play as such - more a series of reminiscenses pulled together reasonably neatly. To be fair, it appeared under comedy in the fringe programme, but it was a structured stage piece, with the script on sale outside.

The Irish comic Owen O'Neill put together a production of 12 Angry Men, with a cast of comedians (including Bill Bailey and fellow Irish comic Ian Coppinger), which went down really well at the Assembly Rooms. Less successful was Jo Brand's Mental, a two-hander set in a psychiatric hospital. Funnily enough, Ardal O'Hanlon is reprising his role in the West End as the goof (familiar, huh?) in the farce See You Next Tuesday, which he performed at the Gate in Dublin.

And there was some questioning of whether the show of Demetri Martin, the Perrier winner, was comedy or theatre, given that If I . . . is rigidly scripted, is presented like a piece of theatre and incorporates little or no spontaneity or audience interaction. His show also almost won a Fringe First award (which are given for outstanding new writing for theatre).

Ladies And Gents, the Semper Fi show that wowed last year's Dublin Fringe, came to a local convenience and scooped a Fringe First, a deserved accolade for the innovative show set in a toilet. And Bright Colours Only, Pauline Goldsmith's imaginatively staged solo show about an Irish wake, which was at last year's fringe, returned after a year of touring to Edinburgh, where audiences included Sean Connery, who was pictured on the front of the evening paper queuing with his wife to go to the show.

The premiere of Duck, Stella Feehily's first play, for Out of Joint, directed by Max Stafford-Clark (it comes to the Peacock for Dublin Theatre Festival), was a well-paced story about a young woman (Ruth Negga, last seen in Hilary Fanin's Doldrum Bay at the Peacock, was, strangely enough, again playing a sexy young bar tender) on the cusp of life, drifting and exploited, at the edge of drug and sexual seediness in contemporary Dublin. Squashed into Traverse 2, there were strong performances, good characterisations of vaguely dysfunctional family life and a sure portrayal of fragile identity.

Also at the Traverse, David Harrower's Dark Earth was a conventionally plotted and powerful piece of new Scottish drama - a city couple are stranded in the countryside with a middle-aged farming couple and their 20-year-old daughter - which allows for the exploration of relationships, rural versus urban divides, the future of the countryside: all themes that mirror Irish situations. Really strong writing and performance, part of the excellent Traverse season for the festival.

Grid Iron's site-specific Those Eyes, That Mouth was set in a four-storey Georgian house, with the action played around the audience, which moved from room to room. The company lost its original venue two weeks before the festival started when its first house wasn't licensed for performance. Imaginatively and experimentally staged, it knitted the past and present personal and professional lives of a reclusive young woman and her lover. Memorable and beautifully put together, in a more mundane setting it too might have been, well, more mundane.

On the other hand, The Seagull was a conventional staging of a theatre classic. As one of the flagships of the international festival, translated and directed by Peter Stein, it had a dream cast, including Fiona Shaw, Cillian Murphy, Iain Glen, Jodhi May, Dearbhla Molloy and Michael Pennington. This early Chekhov, a play about theatre, is rarely performed, and here was a delicious, langorous production of three and a half hours.

Shaw was in definite non-Medea mode as Irina, the famous actress, and opted to play it almost for laughs - a complicated personality, not a tragic, threatened hero but a histrionic, selfish, self-centred drama queen - with more than a touch of the Ab Fab Edinas about her.

In contrast Kneehigh, the inventive Cornwall-based physical and musical theatre group, presented a devised production, Cry Wolf. It was an anarchic, cross-gendered production of the Red Riding Hood story, with fab music from the Baghdaddies. Definitely not for small children, this was classy, funny and skilful, with an emphasis on the dark side of the myth. Hugely enjoyable.

But in pure comedy terms my favourite line came from the hot property Jimmy Carr - another comic, along with O Briain, deemed too famous for the Perrier. "Just because I'm middle class it doesn't mean I'm not hard. Or, as we like to say, al dente."

And my favourite Edinburgh anecdote (probably apocryphal) has a Scotsman critic reviewing a particularly abysmal show. "I'm amazed anyone considered this piece of **** worth putting on." Next day there was an addition to the posters: " 'Amazing.' Four stars. (The Scotsman)."