The third Theatre Forum Ireland, in Limerick, was fully engaged in the struggle between nobility and reality, reports Peter Crawley

For an audience of theatre makers, milling around the University Concert Hall in Limerick last week, Peter Sellars is a man who needs no introduction.

The controversial American director of opera and theatre has staged Mozart's Don Giovanni in a New York ghetto (in which the soprano performs her aria while shooting up heroin); he has transplanted Handel's Theodora to the 1993 FBI siege of Waco, Texas; and, more recently, he has staged Euripides's The Children of Herakles with a cast of African refugees. His productions regularly sell out 600-seat theatres in advance and, he estimates, they can rely on 75 per cent of the audience walking out before the final curtain. His reputation, in short, precedes him.

However, as the keynote speaker of the third Theatre Forum Ireland conference, Sellars did receive an introduction. And so it was that with a few words from the director of the Abbey Theatre, crediting Sellars as an artist who actively engages with society, Fiach MacConghail initiated two days of discussions, interviews and "soapbox" polemics with reference to the Abbey's socially engaged future and also, via a salient quote from WB Yeats, to its past.

"Great art, great poetic drama, is the utmost of nobility and the utmost of reality," Yeats wrote. "If there is too much of the first, all becomes sentimental; too much of the second, all becomes sordid. Nobility struggles with reality, the eagle and the snake . . ."

"Ladies and gentlemen," MacConghail added to what could have been the motto of this year's Theatre Forum, "I give you the eagle and the snake, Peter Sellars."

This was a great and stirring introduction, and, like all great and stirring introductions, difficult to live up to. Besides, Sellars, a diminutive figure with bright eyes and a vertical hairdo, did not always seem equally interested in nobility and reality. He was there to inspire.

His eyes frequently welling with tears, his hands worrying their way around a long strand of decorative red beads, Sellars's passionate contribution was pitched at the level of a stage whisper and was delivered not from a podium but from out among the audience. He bubbled with phrases that were as pleasing and transient as a rush of endorphins: the theatre, he told us, was "a vision space" and its duties included "telling dad what dad doesn't want to hear".

"If you want to change your life, you are not alone," he counselled. (Indeed, it seemed we had come to the right place.)

Theatre offered us a way to "break the prison of identity that every one of us is trapped in". Before our liberation, however, we were invited to hold in our minds an image of our mother ("I want you to look into her eyes"), upon which something or other would enter "the cathedral of your own being". (My notes, I must confess, became a little woozy as this went on, the vision space somehow blurring, the cathedral of my own being closing down for restoration.) There seemed to be no sentiment too woolly or abstraction too vague that Sellars could not conclude with the handy phrase, "and that's what theatre is all about".

Apparently receptive to such encomiums, the delegates of Theatre Forum rewarded Sellars with a standing ovation. If nobility had squared off against reality, you'd have to hand this round to the eagle. Proving far more grounded, practical and even inspirational in one-on-one conversations ("I like to bring things down to the simplest level," he admitted afterwards), Sellars really offered theatre makers an escape from reality, a holiday from their more routine and prosaic concerns.

In the soft embrace of his self-help guru rhetoric, making art felt like a moral imperative and cultural participation seemed to be the right, if not the duty, of every citizen. Theatre mattered. Of course, when you can comfortably discuss your walkouts as a percentage figure of overall attendance, humdrum things such as funding or attracting audiences are unlikely to be first priorities. In Sellars's eyes such concerns seemed anathema to theatre's true concerns, merely more ballast added to the weight of "the probable" or "the tyranny of the likely". The snake, however, had not slid away.

IN THE FIRST of Theatre Forum's soapbox speeches, the independent producer, Anne Clarke, delivered a witty and pithy reproach to the term "interpretive artist", a semantic ghetto which prevents actors, dancers, directors and designers from becoming members of Aosdána. Clarke's speech, made more effective by its concision, did not mince words.

"It is a form of artistic apartheid," she said of Aosdána's creative/interpretive divide, "which would perpetuate an artificial and meaningless distinction, as well as enshrining the pre-eminence of one set of artists over another."

Clarke might have been preaching to the converted, but as she proposed that Theatre Forum should write to each of the 217 members of Aosdána urging that they reform this practice, the force of her convictions, straightforward and measured, seemed unanswerable (or, as Sellars put it: "How do you top that?").

Stimulated by the recent trend for established Irish writers to premiere their works outside Ireland (for example, Tom Murphy's Alice Trilogy last year at London's Royal Court, Marina Carr's Woman and Scarecrow now running at the same theatre and Conor McPherson's forthcoming The Seafarer for the Royal National Theatre), a panel of writers, directors and literary managers addressed such questions as whether Irish theatre companies were failing their writers, if London was a better launching pad for a play, and if it was even possible to sustain a writing career in Ireland alone. (Answers: not really; absolutely; and apparently not.) Ultimately, the discussion came down to a matter of size.

"I mean, we can't compete on that scale," writer Stella Feehily said of the British market at one point, and her light emphasis had a crushing air of finality.

The point trailed into an all too-brief public interview with Tom Murphy the next day. Discussing his career with Tomás Hardiman in the most precise terms and with a wit so dry it may have been a fire hazard, Murphy reflected on his decision to offer Alice Trilogy to the Royal Court.

"Possibly the main reason I sent the Alice Trilogy to England was that it would inevitably come back to Ireland," he said. "The last full-length original play I had done in this country was The House. And that was done at The Abbey. Conall Morrison directed it. It was a critical, commercial and artistic success. It's certainly one of the best things I've ever done, if not the best. It meant an awful lot to me. But it was on, it was gone. And there was no more interest in it."

Alice Trilogy makes its long-awaited Irish debut in the Abbey Theatre at this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, in a production to be directed by Murphy himself. Asked why he had decided to direct his own work, Murphy playfully responded: "Because nobody in the country could do it better."

Outside the country, the theatre sometimes resembled a flashpoint for an explosive clash between art and politics. In a panel discussion on censorship and artistic freedom, provocatively titled Asking for Trouble and expertly chaired by the Irish director, Conall Morrison, international theatre makers described the problems they had faced staging plays that aroused the ire of religious objectors.

Janet Steel, the director of Gurpreet Bhatti's 2004 play, Behzti (Dishonour), based among the Sikh community in England and set in a gurdwara, or Sikh temple, recalled the tensions, riots and even death threats that led to the cancellation of the play in Birmingham.

"That's the upshot, really," she quietly concluded. "We got silenced. We lost."

The applause felt incongruous. Neal Foster, manager of the Birmingham Stage Company, who tried unsuccessfully to revive the show, told much the same story.

"We have entered intoa new place in Britain," he said, "because we let the violent people win. And we lost. And it has left us in a very bad state."

More applause.

Given the tension of the situation, one can understand the defensiveness of Steel and Foster, as in their suggestion that the Sikh invective neatly coincided with local elections and that, because of the artifice of theatre, no actual religious icons appeared onstage. But Behzti, which contains scenes of homosexual rape, was a more provocative production than they cared to admit and it fell to the chairman to briefly present the other side of the argument.

Some clarity came from Peter Sellars, who was alive to the sensitivity of minority ethnic groups generally unrepresented on the stage. There are such things as acts of theatrical violence, he suggested, "and you have to be a little more mature, if you want to have an impact deeper than shock value".

Stewart Lee wasn't so sure. Co- written by Lee, Jerry Springer: The Opera so incensed right-wing Christians when it was broadcast on BBC television last year that it prompted 65,000 complaints, as well as organised protests and death threats.

Lee, whose career has largely been spent in stand-up comedy, managed to be both facetious and incisive on the matter, sometimes in the same breath. Lee suggested that theatre and comedy were at their best when asking questions and that religion was at its worst when preserving age-old doctrine irrespective of social change.

Referring to the narrowly thwarted amendments to the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill in Britain, which would have represented a clear threat to free speech, Lee struck a resounding note.

"One of the problems with the Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill that I have at home was that it warned artists against behaviour that might be considered reckless," he said. "For me, that was one of the only points of being in comedy or theatre: to be allowed to behave recklessly in a protected space."

AND YET, FOR all the urgency of the debate, one in which even death threats brought a strange sort of comfort - that the theatre really mattered - the speech that drew most attention from delegates was actor and director Padraic McIntyre's scathing broadside against the Arts Council on behalf of unfunded regional theatre companies.

"The next Rough Magic or Druid may be among you," he noted. "Don't let them slip between your fingers."

Theatre Forum, it is worth recalling, was essentially reborn with that fighting spirit in 2003, transforming itself into a commanding lobby group galvanised by both a boon in funding and the appointment of Tania Banotti as its chief executive. Is it merely coincidental that the theatre community seems strongest when its back is to the wall, when its discussions don't shy away from antagonism, when nobility doesn't lose contact with reality?

Back in his public interview, Tom Murphy resisted the notion of being a chronicler of his times.

"Part of writing," he said, "and definitely a part of acting, is to escape. To escape reality. Reality doesn't bear thinking about."

Maybe not. But perhaps the eagle shouldn't soar too far above the snake.And, to borrow a phrase, that's what theatre is all about.