The culture collective

Edinburgh's festival season has become an indelible fixture on the cultural calendar. Here, Al Senter gives his guide to this month's feast of performance, debate, art and music

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Not in Edinburgh, it appears, as eager culture vultures prepare to swoop down once again upon the city's ever-growing festival of arts. The Edinburgh Festival is, in fact, a collection of festivals. Since its inception in 1947, the International Festival—which celebrates music, drama, dance and opera—has been shadowed by the Festival Fringe. The Fringe alone is the largest arts festival in the world, yet this is only the beginning of what's on offer in the city during August.

Alongside these are Edinburgh's Art Festival, Military Tattoo, International Book Festival and Festival of Politics. A limited number of Festival venues are scattered in outlying towns and on Edinburgh's periphery but most are clustered in the districts to the south of the Royal Mile, the ancient slope linking Edinburgh Castle with Holyrood Palace, and the elegant squares and crescents of the Georgian New Town. A stout pair of legs and a solid pair of walking shoes are recommended for the endless traipsing between attractions. There are now innumerable bars, cafes and brasseries—in addition to the traditional Edinburgh pub—where the exhausted cultural consumer can pull in for a pit stop.

Newcomers to the Festival would do well to orient themselves around George Street, flanked by Princes Street to the south and Queen Street to the north. At George Street's western end lies Charlotte Square and its handsome gardens, home to the Edinburgh International Book Festival since 1983. To help celebrate its Silver Jubilee, it is fitting that the Book Festival should welcome as its star guest one of the city's most famous sons. Sir Sean Connery, who once worked the streets of Edinburgh on a horse-drawn milk cart, is launching Being A Scot, a memoir that reflects the actor's abiding patriotic pride. Connery joins a list of more traditional literary heavyweights—Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Irvine Welsh, Julian Barnes and Terry Pratchett—together with local literati Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith.

A few minutes' walk to the east of Charlotte Square is Assembly, one of the Fringe's flagship venues. A feature of Fringe evolution in recent years has been the growth of such supervenues, including the Gilded Balloon, the Pleasance and the Underbelly. Not only do they stage round-the-clock events at their respective bases but they now also have a number of satellite venues.

So how can you separate the wheat from the chaff? Inclusion in the charmed circle of the supervenues is a mark of quality, but there are still plenty of talented performers working outside the high-profile addresses.

The Fringe embraces an enormous range of entertainments, although it has become increasingly dominated by comedy. Ordinary members of the public can expect to be joined by eager, talent-spotting executives from the BBC and Channel 4. Onstage, watch out for the usual suspects familiar from such programmes as QI, Mock The Week, and The News Quiz, including Bill Bailey, Jimmy Carr, Ed Byrne, Rich Hall, Sean Lock and Paul Merton.

There's also stand-up from local girl Rhona Cameron and shows from the wonderfully droll Count Arthur Strong, veterans Barry Cryer, Jim Bowen and Nicholas Parsons, the indefatigable Neil and Christine Hamilton, the quirky poet John Hegley, the wittily camp Kit and the Widow and the optimistically titled 100 Years of German Humour. Other notable names appearing on the Fringe this year include Clive James, Elaine Paige, Simon Callow, Michael Barrymore, Britt Ekland, Hazel O'Connor and motormouth comedienne Joan Rivers.

Towards the eastern end of George Street stands the legendary George Hotel, the traditional heart of the International Television Festival (22-24 August). Despite the name of the event and the fact that it celebrates the world's most popular medium, this is less a public exposition, more a private industry event—and an excuse for unashamed networking. The centrepiece James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture is normally the focus of the Festival and it gives a platform to media A-listers to sound off on any burning industry issues. This year the address will be given by Peter Fincham, ITV's new director of television, and there will be appearances from Jamie Oliver, Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan.

The International Festival lives up to its name with a programme showcasing companies from eastern Europe, Balkans, Caucasus and from the Middle East. Local interest is represented by the National Theatre of Scotland with a new play from Scottish writer David Harrower, 365: One Night To Learn A Lifetime, about children in care and their transition to adulthood. Two landmark plays from the past 30 years of London's Royal Court Theatre, Class Enemy and 4.48 Psychosis, are performed by Bosnian and Polish companies respectively and there are visits from an eclectic mixture of artists including the great pianist Alfred Brendel, making his final appearance in Edinburgh, the London Symphony Orchestra with a Prokofiev cycle, and Istanbul Music and Sema Group, performing a whirling dervish ceremony.

Iconoclastic dance maestro Matthew Bourne is also in Edinburgh masterminding the world premiere of his new work, Dorian Gray. This adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Gothic novel moves the action from Victorian England to the "noughties" and sets the story among London's gilded party animals.

Those suffering from a surfeit of performance may prefer the peace of one of Edinburgh's art galleries. There is no shortage of venues in Edinburgh where the visual arts will soothe aching feet or overstretched minds. The Royal Scottish Academy and the Scottish National Gallery are housing Impressionism and Scotland. The exhibition includes works by Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh—and the Scottish painters they inspired. Less restful, perhaps, is a retrospective of Tracey Emin's work over the last 20 years, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

The various Festivals begin to wind down during the last week of August, but there is a spectacular finale on Sunday August 31 with the now traditional Bank of Scotland Fireworks Concert in Princes Street Gardens. The programme develops an eastern Europe theme, with selections from Dvorak's Slavonic Dances and Brahms's Hungarian Dances, exhilarating music that will send the good people of Edinburgh and beyond jigging deliriously through the streets of Auld Reekie. We'll all need 11 months to recover before Edinburgh is in Festival mood again.