Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis is one of Edinburgh's bleakest bits of programming. Photograph: Stefan Okolowicz
Leafing through the programme for this year's Edinburgh International Festival, I'm struck by the sombre tone of it all. It's unquestionably great stuff - Rachmaninoff, Smetana, Harrower, Goebbels - but there are precious few smiles here, let alone laughs.
Reading from the programme blurbs: "The suffering soul of a Holocaust victim ... 4.48am is when the will to live is at its lowest ebb ... A murderer rants on a staircase ... Following heart surgery, a barely conscious poet is haunted by memories ... In a run-down schoolroom a group of foul-mouthed high-school students ... A Schubert song brutally interrupted by people who want to talk about their voluntary enlistment in the SS ... There are over 70,000 children in care in Britain today ... Five women are living on an abandoned island ... Kristallnacht ... Auschwitz ..."
Personally, I'm all for high seriousness, and I'd love to attend every one of these fine-sounding and, in some cases, challengingly bleak events. But are we getting to a point where we equate high art only with the grimmer explorations into the human spirit?
Shakespeare, Mozart and a host of others promised us this wasn't so. It strikes me that this Edinburgh programme is all Schindler's List and King Lear and no Cosi Fan Tutte or Some Like it Hot. Is art vanishing into the dark?
