Various venues, Clonmel www.junctionfestival.com

For a town with no committed performing arts venue, Clonmel punches well above its weight with one particularly vibrant festival for nine days in July. This year’s Junction Festival again infuses its programme of theatre and music with a feel and sensibility for performance that often means getting first dibs on spellbinding international acts.

Take Korean theatre group Cho-In, whose The Angel and the Woodcutter(above) proved an enormous critical success in Edinburgh last year. Performed entirely without words, using music, puppetry and movement, it transforms a Korean folk tale into an anti-war fable that requires no translation.

Neither Eamon Morrissey's one-man Myles na Gopaleen revue, The Brother, nor Oxford Playhouse's lunatic, lunar performance, One Small Step, nor the strong range of children's theatre is likely to wrestle much attention away from Faulty Towers… The Dining Experience, in which anyone whose ever wanted to see a familiar, tall Englishman physically abuse a Spaniard while they eat dinner, will have every appetite satiated. Also a hit in Edinburgh, it may give the impression of another programme largely sourced from Caledonia, but the difference is Junction's eye for what's cool and how to bring things together. It's a festival that joins at the hip.

Can’t see that? Catch this

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Dublin