Various venues, Belfast Until Oct 31 www.belfastfestival. com 028-90971197
It has humble origins as the brainchild of a Queen’s University undergrad, but the plucky undertaking that later became the Belfast Festival at Queen’s would soon become a gravitational force significant enough to attract Jimi Hendrix, the Moscow State Ballet and Billy Connolly to Northern Ireland.
In recent years the festival has seemed to be on the cusp of incipient financial disaster, but sponsorship from Ulster Bank has lately put it on a much firmer footing. For its 47th programme, under the direction of Graeme Farrow, the interdisciplinary festival is again seeking a balance between international spectacles and strong homegrown work from both sides of the border.
In the former category comes a show designed to appeal to a combination of thrillseekers and petrolheads in Macbeth – Who Is That Bloodied Man?, a production from Poland whose revving political motivations are translated into a fire-belching, motorbike- racing, ahistorical take on Shakespeare's leanest and meanest play.
Next to it, DV8's To Be Straight With Youis more discreetly provocative, but no less political, while domestic work such as Gavin Kostick's play about Northern Irish Judaism, This Is What We Sang, for Kabosh; the Abbey's much-travelled Terminus; and Prime Cuts' new production of Russian absurdist Vassily Sigarev's Black Milkare all commensurate with a festival that has always reached far beyond its borders, whether they be campus confines, city limits or country codes.
