Magic cycle is just the ticket for touts

It is something that few people who have staged a show at Edinburgh thought they would ever live to see - ticket touts. Every night before performances of Scottish Opera's rapturously received full cycle of Wagner's Ring, the pavement outside the Festival Theatre is thick with shifty men with tickets.

All four operas - whose brilliant staging, devised well before September 11, has prophetic echoes of the slaughter to come - sold out in October. But such is the rarity of a complete staging of the 16-hour cycle, and the fanaticism of Wagnerians who have come from as far as Canada and Japan - many dressed as Valkyries and Teutonic gods - that complete sets of tickets have been changing hands for £500 and more.

For many, no price is too high to pay. A hard core slept rough outside the box office to get their hands on 50 tickets held back for Das Rheingold. Jim Naughtie, the opera buff and presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, offered his seats - at face value of around £250 - to anyone in the audience with the ready cash when he appeared at the book festival.

Edinburgh has never had it so good. With a fortnight to go, the fringe has already smashed the record 1m tickets sold it set last year. That put it ahead of the Commonwealth Games in Manchester. This year the final figure could surpass a staggering 1.3m. So far the fringe box office has taken £2.3m, while the venues themselves are estimated to have banked triple that.

It is proof, the fringe director Paul Gudgin believes, of the enormous untapped appetite for experimentation. "It's phenomenal. We can barely believe it ourselves," he said. "But it's the increase in quality spread right across the board that's thrilling."

Extra performances are being laid on to cope, and remarkably for an art form which was on its knees three years ago, four of the top-selling shows are theatre. Ladies and Gents, a play set in a public toilet, has extended its run twice.

The book festival - already the world's largest - is up by a similar level, with close to half a million expected to visit its tented village in Charlotte Square by the month's end. The film festival too, even without the star-wattage of previous years, has seen audiences rise by a third. And even the international festival, seen for years now as the sick man of the city's five-ringed circus, is up by a fifth.

That figure, however, masks some depressing failures. Only 70 people stayed to the end of a free young people's performance of Gotterdammerung in the 1,900-seater Festival Theatre, the new late-night Crossing Cultures concerts have not yet taken off, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic was deeply underwhelming. The Ring - brilliant as it is - is also cursed with a weak Siegfried in Graham Sanders, by common consent, and appears to have driven Scottish Opera, already £3m in the red, closer to the financial precipice.

But when it has been good, the international festival has been astonishing. Hundreds of people rarely leave concerts with tears streaming down their faces these days, as the audience did after hearing Dietrich Henschel, the best baritone in the world, at the Queen's Hall. The same euphoria, as well as Edinburgh's most startling box office statistics, are to be found at the fringe's most avant-garde venue, Aurora Nova at St Stephen's, far from the big-name comedians at the Assembly Rooms and the celebrity-thronged bars of the Traverse and Pleasance.

After the Ring, it is at St Stephen's where the touts, albeit of a usually artier and more generous disposition, are doing most business. Three times a day, queues stretch 100 metres for tickets. Overnight this sedate corner of the Georgian New Town has become coolest place to be.

Despair

Five months ago its Potsdam-based artistic director, Wolfgang Hoffmann, and his backers from the Komedia in Brighton were contemplating pulling the plug, having lost £25,000 the previous year. "We couldn't sustain that loss," said organiser Alice Hartmann, and it seemed their two-year multinational experiment in idealism and innovation, which seemed to embody the fringe's lost soul, would end in despair.

Now they can breathe easy with box office up 120% and a huge critical buzz around shows like Pandora 88, White Cabin, Crowley, Zouff!, and Fallen in its mix of physical theatre, dance and music.

Other churches too are reaping the benefits of cannily turning themselves over to performers. St Cuthbert's - renamed St Cuts - and nearby St George's in the normally staid West End have opened their doors to the biggest crowds they have seen in a century.

St Cuts boasts two Paul Daniels magic shows and a comic abridged version of the Ring which is almost as oversubscribed as the real thing, while the minister of St George's, Peter Macdonald, has welcomed Julian Clary's Natural Born Mincer and Hank Wangford in the German comedy 100% Sex Therapy. "I hope it shows that not all Christians are narrow-minded, puritanical and judgmental. Some of us can get our knickers off, rather than in a twist."

But not all churches are quite so tolerant. The first British production of the acclaimed German play The Child-Killer, Portrait of a Paedophile was shown the door at the Kirk o' Fields church - re-styled as The Zoo for the festival - even before it opened. It has since found a home at the Pleasance.

Like the churches, the council is making a killing in hiring out empty spaces. Edinburgh made £120m from the festival three years ago, when its economic impact was last gauged. But even with record attendances, 90% of the 1,500 shows will not make money. However, with the British Council bringing foreign bookers and the bars packed with producers and talent scouts, the outlay will pay off for some.

For others, the daily slog brings only disappointment. Until Tuesday, the singer Helen Reddington held the dubious honour of being the only act not to have sold a single ticket. Then nine people turned up to her teatime show, Voxpop Puella. The next night she was back to an empty room. So Helen, a punk turned university lecturer, brought her two young daughters on stage and they sang to their own echo. "It's heartbreaking, but I'm not giving up. The word is, very slowly, getting out," she sighed.

Baritone shows his class but Aaron is awful
Fringe benefits...

· The Ring. Cash-strapped Scottish Opera's gritty staging of Wagner's epic masterpiece is the best many critics have ever seen. At the Festival Theatre

· Dietrich Henschel. The German baritone proved why he is the best baritone in the world at the Queen's Hall.

· The Straits. Gregory Burke's brilliant follow-up to Gargarin Way is set in Gibraltar in 1982 just as the Royal Navy taskforce approaches the Falklands. At the Traverse Theatre

· Flight of the Conchords: High on Folk. Two Kiwis, two acoustic guitars and the best folk parody act ever seen on the fringe. At the Gilded Balloon Caves

· Anything at Aurora Nova at St Stephen's. Take your pick

Beyond the fringe...

· Osama Likes It Hot. Aaron Barschak, the comedian who went over the wall of Windsor Castle, is awful, but improving apparently. One clearly overwrought critic called him "the Jewish Billy Connolly" after he read the full text of the report into security at the castle on stage. At the Underbelly

· Sweet FA by the Theatre of Relatively. An hour of nothing, no script, no music, no actors. At Sweet at Crowne Plaza