Edinburgh was Frankenstein's favourite city - he was a man of the Enlightenment, and no wonder all those gloriously rational 18th-century streetscapes appealed. But we all know how his last experiment ended up. It stands as a dire warning against man tampering, God-like, with the natural order. And what was most surprising in this year's Edinburgh Festival was that that post-Industrial Revolution fear of the present and future still seems to dominate so much art.
In Mark Ravenhill's Shopping And F***king, the point that we are witnessing the breakdown of everything we understood as social order is written in capitals: "I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of God and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're all making up our own stories."
Ravenhill's three main characters are unemployed twenty somethings, one of them trying to beat addiction to heroin and the play is set in the aftermath of his leaving to seek help with his addiction. It all goes horribly wrong for the two who remain and they find themselves selling their souls to a white-collar gangster, who is the essence of evil.
The evocation of a society whose only values are commercial is uncomfortably successful, and backed up, to shocking effect, by Julian McGowan's screen backdrop, against which appear neon signs, bearing distinct resemblances to logos we know and love, a "H" which Diana's new boyfriend would certainly recognise, for instance.
The destruction of love is less well articulated, though it is truly stomach-turning: the heroin addict returns with a 14-year-old, working-class boy, who has been abused by his stepfather for years. All he understands is pain, all he wants is pain - a desire which leads him to engage in life-threatening, masochistic sex - I wonder how many walk-outs there will be during this scene, when the play comes to Andrews Lane next month.
Fellow Scotland On Sunday Critics' Award winner, Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs, produced by the Cork-based Corcadorca company, obviously inhabits the same world, and it is admired by Ravenhill. It is playing at the Traverse Theatre, with a rake of other new plays, the most successful of which seem also to represent young people as having no faith, no hope, no family, and no decent jobs.
Fringe First winner, Hellcab by US writer, Will Kern, is a day in the life of a young man who takes up cab-driving in Chicago out of desperation. A cab is one of the few spaces left in which Americans of all classes meet and interact, however, and as the cabbie drives towards Christmas Day, he hears stories which present a terrifying view of American society, if, as L.A. News says, the play really "holds a mirror up to the American soul".
Anna Weiss by the Scottish Mike Cullen, winner of a Fringe First as well as a Critics' Award registers, like Shopping And F***ing, a strong protest against the bogus shamans of today: the quacks of the psychology industry, who make a belief system for others out of their own problems. So a father, movingly played by John Stahl, is irretrievably distanced from his own daughter by an accusation of sexual abuse - abuse which probably lives in the memory of his daughter's therapist.
As well as Shopping And F***ing, Out Of Joint theatre company is involved in the production of two new playlets by Caryl Churchill at the Traverse. Churchill's works, under the title Blue Heart, seem like a bit of fun, but are deeply nihilistic at their core, which does not stop them being slight. The second tells the story of a man whose hobby is pretending he is the long-lost adopted son of many women. The text is drizzled with the nonsense words, "blue" and "kettle" - "I'm not the only qualified kettle without a job", says our friend, sternly - so showing that even flesh and blood connections are spun with the flimsy artifice of language.
Steven Berkoff dismantles the village green construction of Britishness with a click of his heels and a wiggle of his bottom, in Massage At The Assembly Rooms. For he (she) is a hooker on the quiet, unbeknowst to her Torytrumpeting husband, who is capable of rhapsodising for 15 minutes on the "gweat Bwitish tipple": tea. It is not until this crashing bore meets his wife in the line of business, as it were, that sex is allowed into the home of our quiet, hard-working Bwitish couple.
Shakespeare's Measure For Measure was directed for the Festival and the Nottingham Playhouse by the French wunderkind director, Stephane Braunschweig, and read by the critics as a dark commentary on modern British society. Certainly Braunschweig's careful sifting through every word of this text, which poses towering questions about the opposition between law, personified by neat men in grey suits, and natural justice, personified by the innocent Isabella, magnificently played by Lise Stevenson, will not fail to summon up the "appalling vistas" of certain miscarriages of justice for an Irish audience when the show comes to the Dublin Theatre Festival.
Dublin-born writer and actor Mannix Flynn's Talking To The Wall was probably the most hopeful show I saw, and it was a popular Fringe First winner. Perhaps it is in fact extreme difficulty which is the crucible of optimism; while the show is about a character fighting free of borstal and prison to taste freedom, it seems informed by Flynn's own fight to free himself from alcoholism: "I had to come to my life as if it was an archaeological site," he told me, "and brush it with small brushes."
You can't help wondering if it was unease with the romantic which persuaded Scottish Opera and the Nottingham Playhouse to produce the 1912 version of Richard Strauss's Ariadne Auf Naxos. It is a centaur of a piece, which presents the opera as a diversion in the house of Moliere's Le Bour- geois Gentilhomme, so that it - and the opera-goers in the audience - are mocked for their pretensions. Those who brought this mind-numbingly boring hotchpotch to the stage are most mocked, however - why did they not heed the warnings of Strauss and his librettist, Hofmannsthal, who aborted the experiment in 1916?
As it happened, there were enough bourgeois gentilhommes in the audience to ensure it was well received, despite direction, by Martin Duncan, which robbed Moliere of any bite he still has. We only came to the singing after more than two hours, but it was magnificent: the tender tale of Ariadne woken from grief to love, and a glorious vehicle for the soprano voices of Anne Evans (Ariadne) and Lisa Saffer (Zerbinetta). Scottish Opera will produce the opera alone in the spring.
That there was a robust questioning of romantic values in the early part of the century, as the machine suddenly obtruded itself into everyone's life, is understandable. The main visual arts exhibition running during the festival, Surrealism And After, articulates this questioning vividly - and it had the perfect aural counterpart in the Kirov Orchestra's performance of Prokofiev's Symphony No. 2 in D Minor (1925), which the composer intended to sound "made of iron and steel". The show is from the collection of Gabrielle Keiller, daughter of a Texan rancher and widow of a marmalade millionaire, who spent childhood holidays in the house her grandmother bought, Glenveagh Castle in Donegal. Paul Delvaux's La Rue Du Tramway presents the clash between the soft flesh of nude women and a steadily advancing train, while Francis Picabia's Girl Born Without A Mother, adapted from an illustration of a steamengine which has been mutilated so that it cannot work, suggests profound alienation.
Of course, there is great beauty in much of this work: Magritte's frame, curved around a woman's hip in La Representation, throws off conformity to great sensual effect, while Dali, in Le Signal d'Angoisse, say, is not so much protesting as creating his own world of erotic symbolism. It is surprising, however, that nowadays so many visual artists still seem so overawed, so invaded by the new textures of the modern material world, so that it is constantly protested against rather than fashioned into new symbols.
There was, of course, plenty of unadulterated fun at the festival as well. Take Blinded By Love, presented by the Catalan La Cubana group, which is the truly grotesque tale of a 1960s childhood prodigy, Estrellita, still lisping under her blonde wig on her 46th birthday. The audience sinks into the dire movie, because we will watch and believe anything on a movie screen, but the antics of certain planted members of the audience are so loud that the film characters turn on them, jump out of the screen, and then jump back in. The technical wizardly is astounding, and offers a powerful challenge to the world of the flat screen.
The ghastly story parodies every worst Spanish stereotype, with just a little too much Catalan glee; when one character lets out a howl he is told, briskly: "This is no time for flamenco." Lobby those festival organisers to bring it here.
There was plenty of romance to be found in established works: the San Francisco Ballet performing a programme of Balanchine's choreography to classics such as Stravinsky's Violin Concerto, or Maggie Mac Innes's clear soprano tackling the gorgeous Gaelic songs which follow the rhythms of walking.
But it is surprising that in a period of relative affluence, 200 years after the Industrial Revolution and 50 years after the second World War, fear of and protest against the existing order still seem to dominate new work, rather than new orders and new hope.
A report on the Edinburgh Film Festival will be published on Friday's Vision page
