- guardian.co.uk, Saturday 19 August 2000 02.00 BST
A disastrous run for the festival's four-hour centrepiece, the Barbaric Comedies - which has been playing to audiences of only a few hundred - has put huge strain on its already precarious finances.
The Spanish epic, translated by the Irish writer Frank McGuinness from the works of Ramon del Valle-Inclan for Dublin's Abbey Theatre, was only half full at its premiere on Monday. With another week to run, and despite heavy discounting of tickets, only around a quarter of the seats have been sold.
Last month the festival's artistic director Brian McMaster predicted that if the risk on the production did not pay off the event might go to the wall.
"We are trying to turn it into a piece of popular, spectacular theatre that talks to a lot of people," he said.
With reviews damning McGuinness's translation as a "parody, a case of excess run riot" and, in the case of the Daily Telegraph critic, "everything that is wrong, and rotten about the Edinburgh international festival", the writing now seems to be on the wall.
But yesterday, despite the increasing sense of doom surrounding the play, McMaster insisted that he had meant the remarks as a "joke", and that he would never risk the festival on a single production.
McMaster's five-year reign at the festival has been heavily criticised for its lack of adventure and for elitism, while the rival fringe has gone from strength to strength. But he maintains that the point of a festival like Edinburgh is that organisers can take a bet on productions that might otherwise never be staged.
Yesterday his spokeswoman said that while the Barbaric Comedies "had not been performing quite as well as we had hoped", the losses so far had been more than compensated for by the surprise success of the New York City Ballet at the 3,000-seat Edinburgh Playhouse.
"A festival like this is full of checks and balances, so what you lose on one you gain on the other. We are confident the Barbaric Comedies will pick up," she said.
Meanwhile, the Edinburgh film festival has turned up that rarest of beasts, an extremely good new British film which has rival distributors battling to sign it up. The Low Down, a wry urban love story starring Aidan Gillen of Queer As Folk fame, is the first feature from the Londoner Jamie Thraves, who has already stacked up a mantelpiece full of prizes for his short films. He also shot the award-winning video for Radiohead's song Just.
The film is a smart, funny and surprisingly sophisticated story about a group of twentysomething slackers in east London who are drifting towards that pivotal moment in life when mortgages and marriages begin to happen.
Critics are already comparing Thraves to Lynne Ramsay, the fastest rising star of the British screen, whose debut Ratcatcher won a Bafta last year and high praise at Cannes.
The other big hit of the festival so far has been the Brazilian film Me You Them, which tells the story of a peasant woman in Ceara state who manages to keep three husbands on the go at once.
