DUBLIN -- Irish theater is one of the chief glories of our English-speaking world, but it wasn't the chief attraction of the 2005 Dublin Theatre Festival, which ends this weekend. As new artistic director Don Shipley said, this 48th edition of the two-week festival concentrated on an international program, not the Irish/international balance of 2002 and 2003, when there was new or classic work by Kilroy, Friel, Murphy and the other great living Irish playwrights.

		Related column On Stage: Truths revealed in Irish theater are often painful

In fact, of this year's 18 shows from 10 countries, the United Kingdom (five shows) outnumbered Ireland (three), with one more shared between them. The other shows came one each from Russia, Georgia, Lithuania, Belgium, South Africa and the United States, with three for children from Germany and Peru.

It has been a festival with much to challenge Americans, who don't normally get to see such a wide range of international companies as they do in Europe -- last year's Pittsburgh Festival of Firsts being the exception that proves the rule.

Shipley noted that the festival's eclectic pieces, ranging from classic to electronic, from puppet opera to dance epic and from limp entertainment to stringent abstraction, all shared what he called "dominant themes of passion, politics and betrayal." And fittingly, no show better matched that characterization or lit up the festival with more visceral excitement than the most Irish piece, Michael Keegan-Dolan's "The Bull."

I can't fairly characterize the whole festival, though, because I was there for only six days during its first week, and most shows ran just one week or the other. I didn't get to see the other big Irish play about passion, politics and betrayal, "Bloody Sunday: Scenes From the Saville Inquiry," a docudrama of the recent British inquiry into the 1972 killings of civil rights demonstrators in Derry. And I missed the most promising of the festival's three Shakespeares, a Lithuanian "Romeo & Juliet" (there's more passion and betrayal) set in a contemporary pizza shop.

There also were some shows I chose not to see, like "I Am My Own Wife" starring Jefferson Mays, whom I'd already seen on Broadway, or Russia's Akhe Company in "White Cabin," which we saw last fall in Pittsburgh.

But I did see a lot -- eight shows and one extra. And even while overseeing simultaneous groups of Pitt students and Post-Gazette theater-trippers, I squeezed in a lot more of Dublin.

So as the brief reviews that follow illustrate, the Dublin Theatre Festival has a lot to be enjoyed, even when taking potluck. It's intimate enough for a newcomer to have a good time on first encounter, and it's set in an historic, congenial, accessible city. You might want to take note that the festival comes around every early October.

The other reason for these reviews is to spread the word about some companies and works that, in this shrinking world, we might well see elsewhere.

Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, "The Bull"

This is the one I'd most like to see in Pittsburgh, though I expect it would raise some hackles, as it did with a few members of the Post-Gazette group who objected to the visceral view of Ireland it presents. As I say in my column, more power to it -- nothing typifies the great mold-breaking Irish plays like audience controversy.

Playwright and director Michael Keegan-Dolan has done this before. In 2003, the hit of the festival was his company's boldly re-imagined "Giselle," which took the classical story line and transposed it to the gritty, turbulent, comically lurid western Ireland of Martin McDonagh. With "The Bull," Keegan-Dolan raises this idiosyncratic vision up a notch to operatic melodrama that is comic and tragic at the same time.

"The Bull" is based on the "T?in Bo C?alnge" (roughly, "The Cattle-Raid of Cooley"), the central epic of the Ulster cycle, mythic tales of heroes written in the 11th or 12th centuries but derived perhaps from a millennium before. Older than "Beowulf," it can be compared to that, the "Iliad" and other epic matter in which tribal warfare gets heightened poetic expression.

Remember that, for all its glamour, the "Iliad" is driven by the pursuit of a faithless wife. Similarly, the "T?in" is about a one-upping argument between a king and a queen that requires her to set all Ireland at war to capture a prized bull. But Keegan-Dolan sets this ancient story in a modern Ireland of East European hit men, swaggering psychopaths, terrorists, greed and gruesome (often funny) Quentin Tarantino-like slayings.

The play starts with competing warrior gangs digging furiously on a stage heaped high with peat, uncovering a coffin and within it a surprise narrator with an ancient book. He insists they can't bury the story, suggesting the coming to terms with the past incumbent on all the riven halves of Ireland -- north and south, Protestant and Catholic, native and emigre, male and female, sacred and profane.

The story of the resulting conniving and slaughter is told with outrageous humor and deadpan brutality. Along the way there is a running parody of "Riverdance," and the great hero Cuchulain becomes the dourest of the murderous country folk we know from McDonagh and Synge. Propelling the story are dialogue, narration, music (especially percussion) and lots of dance.

But I wouldn't call it dance theater. It's epic ritual driven by robust dark comedy, social satire and guttural opera with flashes of tenderness, a compelling image of violence that strips away phony glamour and questions all wars from Troy to Iraq. And Fabulous Beast's multinational company is itself a prophetic prism for the multicultural Ireland of today and tomorrow.

Shared Experience, "Bronte"

This is a famous English company whose specialty is to investigate classics, such as developing Helen Edmundson's "Anna Karenina," staged by Quantum in 2000. Here, playwright/director Polly Teale tackles the Bront?s for the third time, following her "Jane Eyre" and "After Mrs. Rochester."

While sketching in the pinched and claustrophobic domestic biography of the Bront?s, with their tragically short lives, the acting company of six focuses on the psychic space between that and the dark emotional life that animates "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights."

The mode is compelling: As they don drab, demure 19th-century garb, the actors playing sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne discuss the limited lives the Bront?s lived. On a sketchy stage (complete with "Bront? Kitchen" and "Drawing Room" stenciled on the floor), they individually start to write. Charlotte discovers Emily's passionate poetry. No woman has written this way before, they believe, and they may be right.

A fourth actor, the darkly expressive Natalia Tena, emerges as the fevered Cathy of Emily's imagination and the terrifying mad woman who expresses the fears in Charlotte's. Two men play their brother and father, along with other men in their lives, as well as the Heathcliff and Rochester they imagine. The connections that the play suggests between their lives and novels are sometimes compelling and sometimes just pop psychological cliche, but in immediate dramatic terms the play keeps pulsing forward.

Only occasionally does "Bront?" (dull title!) seem more interested in biography than drama, pausing for a didactic point. Sometimes, the sisters' insights seem suspiciously modern. But of course they were. And any hesitation I have is lost in the drive of inventive performance. They do indeed create a shared experience.

Gate Theatre, "Old Times" and "Celebration"

In honor of Harold Pinter's 75th birthday, the Gate staged "Old Times" and is now continuing with "Betrayal," with a weekend of all-star readings sandwiched between.

Every "Old Times" is different. Under Michael Caven's measured direction, Stephen Brennan, Janie Dee and Donna Dent mined the subterranean ambiguities of the triangular warfare. Compared to the version just at Pitt, they overwhelmed me with a sense of women's power.

The seated reading of "Celebration," Pinter's recent comedy about hard men (mobsters, bankers, that sort) showing off in an ostentatious restaurant, was fun, with the truculent Michael Gambon playing off a bemused Derek Jacobi, with Sinead Cusack and Penelope Wilton as their adoring/ironic wives, Jeremy Irons sparring with arch bimbo Dee and Stephen Rea, Brennan and Dent intruding as waiters from hell.

Pinter was there and seemed very pleased: a perfect appetizer to the welcome news just a couple of days later of his Nobel Prize.

Propeller, "The Winter's Tale"

Director Edward Hall, son of Sir Peter, is hot, and he has a particular rapport with the all-male ensemble Propeller, based at England's Watermill Theatre, which he helped start eight years ago. They do Shakespeare, and Hall's modern-dress "Winter's Tale" is a very smart production, though the acting doesn't always measure up to its good ideas.

The most ostentatious idea is that the men should remain clearly men, which is an odd choice for a play which is so much about the differences between men and women. There's no concession made to beauty. But the verse speaking is fine and the through-line of this tortured tale of sudden jealousy and slow redemption is clear. Using the same actor to play the doomed boy, Mamillius, the choric Time and then the redemptive daughter, Perdita, is thematically brilliant.

And it pays off in Hall's breathtaking ending, where, after Shakespeare's reunion, each character takes his/her leave of Leontes in a way that acknowledges the tragic losses he has caused. This is dark comedy with purpose, as New York will discover when it comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music next month.

Abbey and Lyric Theatres, "Hamlet"

But I don't see much purpose in this noisy, ham-fisted "Hamlet." Director Conall Morrison and his designers do striking things with video and projections (though less as the play goes on, as is often the case with such innovations); I loved the ghost projected on Hamlet's bare chest. But Patrick O'Kane's vigorous prince takes everything at such a fevered pitch that it all blurs into undifferentiated passion. And when has there ever been a less sexy, more pallid Claudius and Gertrude?

Tbilisi Marionette Theatre (Georgia), "The Battle of Stalingrad: A Requiem"

What a gem: A puppet opera, played by figures between 2 inches and 3 feet tall, operated by five silent black-clad priests of precision in a stage opening perhaps 5 feet by 10. It really does tell the story of the greatest battle of World War II, but through selected everyman (and every animal) figures, as well as generals, artists and mirages. Bathed in anguished Russian music with recorded dialogue (in translation), it plumbed the depths of mournful passion and skittered along the heights of romantic yearning.

Royal Lyceum Theatre (Edinburgh), "Laurel and Hardy"

This one's been around for a while, but I'm not sure why. The impersonations by Barnaby Power (Laurel) and Steven McNicoll (Hardy) are solid, and occasionally they catch the inspired fooling of the famous routines, but the biographical frame by Tom McGrath is pure cardboard, with only a fitful attempt at conflict or thematic coherence..

Victoria (Belgium), "White Star"

I've saved the oddest for last. "White Star" is a Fellini-esque carnival of misfits, a circus of clumsy aspiration and assertions of self, expressed with song, comic routine, pratfall, dance, nudity, acrobatics and individual performing panache. One central figure is a transvestite based on the same Charlotte von Mahlsdorf portrayed in "I Am My Own Wife." Others include a self-mutilating pretty blonde, a spastic, a priest with Down syndrome and a racist bigot.

They speak several languages (sometimes with projected surtitles), bumbling in and out of a half-ring circus, taking the stage in various combinations. At the rear are powerful religious symbols -- a giant cross, prayer candles and kneelers for mass.

Much is obviously particular to a split culture like Belgium's. But which national culture is not split? I could pick out recurring themes of diversity, tolerance and their opposites, but mainly I was swept with a powerful magic of the human comedy in all its grotesque variety. I'd call that a religious mystery.