Edinburgh Festival STREET THEATRE

Street entertainers seem to occupy a privileged position at the Edinburgh Festival. They bag the best venues (the Mound, the Royal Mile, etc). They are viewed as both essential to the whole experience and refreshingly laid-back in comparison with their publicity-hungry Thespian counterparts. But all acts, whether performed on the streets or in shoe-box theatres, obey the same topsy-turvy law of the fringe: if the show is bad enough, the public will love it.

Therefore it is sometimes quite difficult to distinguish the skilled street performer from the semi- or even non-skilled. There's nothing the wandering punter enjoys more than watching someone fumbling with fire. So the majority include a drawn-out spot of fire-juggling and/or fire- eating. As the punters head moth-like for the flames, the busker - without exception - offers them a choice: "How many of you want to see me eat/ juggle/ shove down my pants these flaming torches?"; "How many of you don't want to see me eat/ juggle, etc?"; and, inevitably, after the apathetic show of hands: "How many of you don't give a toss so long as I hurt myself?"

On one of the main Mound pitches, Daniel Wexler grins manically at the torch that refuses to snuff out in his mouth and begs for mercy. "We'll be here all day - it's not going to go out." In and out the torch pops, to the rhythm of the crowd's slow handclap. The passing fringe-goers are going nowhere, willing him to be the DIY fire-eating liability to himself he appears to be.

A few feet away, James Soper is having trouble with his snakeboard. The latter, two rollerskate shoes linked together, requires him to wobble round in a circle for just the right length of time in order to clear Stewart, the middle-aged bald man who is lying helplessly on top of a suitcase. He falls into Stewart's face, he falls on the stones - it doesn't matter, the crowd can wait.

Among the few who rise above the performance-as-rehearsal standard are Aileen - "the only young, attractive woman to juggle fire on a unicycle wearing stilettoes and a tartan mini-skirt" - and the legendary Sam and Andy, who scale the pillars of the National Gallery of Scotland and juggle from on high. Other notables are swamped in "the jungle", the free-for- all end down by the Peruvian music amplifiers, in among the flier distributors, the hair-braiders and the TV crews. Boots Bantock, Bard of Bath, offers old-world style in a jester's outfit, spontaneously composing verse on any suggested theme ("I turn around/ I've just met you/ I will say then/ What do you do ... er ... what did you say your third choice was?")

But where is the street "theatre"? The experimental drama that eschews conventional spaces? The closest thing on the Mound is Danielle and David from Australia, who don large industrial aluminium and plastic coils and wriggle about suggestively together until she secretes a small aluminium worm. Far from the madding crowd in a pedestrian precinct, Theatre Velo from Avignon perform a puppet show to quiet blasts of French radio. A fisherman whose riverbank tranquillity is encroached upon by noisy city folk shuts himself off behind a brick wall. It's beautiful: unobtrusive, yet incongruous, just how you imagine street theatre should be. It's given a wide berth.

n More than 250 performers will be at the Streets of Glasgow Festival, City Centre, Glasgow, today and tomorrow