Ulster Bank Festival at Queen's

Various venues, Belfast

Until Oct 30 028-90971197 belfastfestival.com

For its 49th programme (the last to be curated by artistic director Graeme Farrow), the inter-disciplinary festival is again seeking a balance between strong homegrown work from both sides of the border, and probing international spectacles.

Ransom Productions is staging a double-bill of new one-act plays, Both Sides (of the story), for which writers David Ireland and Robert Anthony Welch explore two different Northern Irish families, one urban and one rural, as they confront a politics and a culture in transition. Dan Gordan and Michael Condron revive Happenstance's well-received production of The Boat Factory, marking the history of the iconic Belfast shipyard and staged – as per the current fashion – in the Victorian Harbour Office. Eileen Walsh occupies yet another flat for Corcadorca's intimate piece of off-site introspection, Request Programme.

International spectacles range from the enjoyably macabre vintage humour of 1927's The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, to the much-anticipated return of the radical Lithuanian Shakespearian director Oskaras Korsunovas, who now takes on Hamlet(pictured) as "a mousetrap for our inner reality" (Lyric Theatre, Oct 26-29). It's certainly one way of reconceiving the tail.

Can't see that? Catch this:Baboró – International Arts Festival for Children Various venues, Galway