The Avignon Festival is the High Mass of European theatre, with 750 productions, none of them in English. While the "neo-brutalists" of eastern Europe have provided the new ideas, the hit performance so far is by a 76-year-old French star, writes Lara Marlow

Out of the anarchical fabric of word of mouth, rumour, and reviews that shape a theatre festival, a favourite usually emerges. At Avignon, the three-week long High Mass of French and European theatre, Michel Bouquet's performance in Minetti will be remembered as emblematic of this season.

There are more daring plays on offer, but Minetti, written by the Austrian, Thomas Bernhard, 13 years before his death in 1989, epitomises the anxious questioning that characterises the last half-century of European theatre. On one level, Minetti is a play about actors, directors and their relationship with the public. But Bernhard's text is more than a private joke for theatre people; it is a metaphor for mankind and the world.

"Dramatic art as the point of one's existence - what a monstrosity," Minetti says, only to contradict himself a few minutes later: "If we did not have our art, we would be doomed to ever deeper despair each day."

Michel Bouquet, the 76-year-old star of the production, acted with Jeanne Moreau at the first Avignon Festival in 1947. The crowds that besiege the ticket counter in the hope of seeing Bouquet on stage sense that theatre history is being made, that with Bouquet playing the kind but bitter, wise and delirious old actor, Avignon has come full circle.

Bernhard named his play after Bernhard Minetti, the most famous German actor of the 20th century, often compared to Laurence Olivier. The real-life Minetti fell from favour after the second World War because he had performed for the Nazis. Until his death, he treasured a mask of King Lear made by the Belgian painter, James Ensor, who was from the North Sea port of Ostend.

In the play, an ageing actor named Minetti travels to Ostend on New Year's Eve for an appointment with a theatre director who wants him to play Lear. The fictional Minetti has betrayed his art by rehearsing Lear alone in front of his mirror, every day for 30 years. A chiming clock punctuates the doom-laden hours of the last night of the year. In a hotel foyer, waiting for the Godot-like director who never arrives, the old man delivers his last performance, a one-sided, sometimes funny Beckettian soliloquy of clipped sentences - "Hate progress", "Solitude, ever greater. Incomprehension, ever greater".

Minetti dies in a snowdrift outside the hotel, wearing his Lear mask. The dwarf whom he mistook for the theatre director bounds through the snow, cackling: "The artist, the dramatic artist."

Marcel Bozonnet, the director of the Comédie Francaise, told me that when theatre is successful, "the mind works as if you are dreaming. You leave the theatre with an impression of relief, or happiness, or depth and seriousness that you carry for hours. You feel you are floating." It is a fine description of the effect of Minetti.

Bozonnet was in Avignon to participate in a tribute to Vaclav Havel, the Czech author and president for whom the festival held an overnight vigil when Havel was in prison 20 years ago.

Contemporary French theatre is less prone to campaigning for grand political causes, though it sometimes addresses social questions like racism and immigration. Bozonnet said the thing that strikes him most about this year's festival is the large number of foreign productions in their original languages - proof, he says, that French theatre is open to the rest of the world.

But that openness does not include English-language theatre. A colloquium organised by socialist party leaders at Avignon denounced US "cultural hegemony" and called on non-English speakers of the world to unite in the defence of diversity. None of the 750 plays in Avignon is performed in English. There are several French-language productions of Shakespeare, an ill-received adaptation of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, and a translation of Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West.

If Claudia Stavisky's production of Minetti won the highest praise for its thoughtful classicism, the other stars of Avignon are the east Europeans and "Latins". The Polish directors, Grzegorz Jarzyna and Krystof Warlikowski, the Spaniard Rodrigo García and the Italians, Romeo Castellucci and Pippo Delbonno, all aged between 30 and 40, are the proponents of a raw, aggressive and unsettling theatre. Their plays exemplify a swing from cerebral language towards the brute physicality of the body on stage.

Jarzyna, whose stage adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 Danish film, Festen, was one of the triumphs of Avignon, is identified with the "neo-brutalist" trend in east European theatre. But the talent shown in Jarzyna's third Avignon production confirms his status as one of the finest directors of the new generation. In Vinterberg's tale of the breakdown of an upper middle-class family, Christian, the eldest son, accuses his "resp- ectable" father of repeatedly raping his twin son and daughter when they were children. Uneasy dinner guests at the father's 60th birthday party attempt to carry on as if nothing has happened, until a suicide note from Christian's twin, Linda, provides incontrovertible proof.

The tension builds to a terrible paroxysm, and yet the family gathers again the following morning.

"I know that when you pack and go I shall never see any of you again," the father tells his children.

"A perfect speech, Papa," says the violent son, Michael. "Will you go away now, so we can finish our breakfast?"

The evil and hypocrisy are only partially exorcised, but the children now have a chance at a normal life.

The fall of communism freed east European directors from political themes, but Jarzyna says they were slow to look at Polish society and families.

"That space was occupied by the Church," he says. "People are only beginning to address problems like alcoholism, child abuse and paedophilia. I think we were too Catholic to do it."

Jarzyna has not lost his own faith, but says he feels let down by the Church. The first revelations about paedophile priests in Poland coincided with his production of Festen, he notes. He is not breaking taboos, he insists, merely describing society.

Earlier this year, in Poland and Germany, Jarzyna directed Psychosis, by the late British playwright, Sarah Kane. She committed suicide three years ago at the age of 29, after writing four dark and violent plays which are greatly admired by the "neo-brutalists".

Kane's Cleansed is presented at Avignon by Warlikowski, in Polish. The play is about a woman who wants to become her dead brother, and includes scenes of shooting up drugs and the amputation of a male homosexual to facilitate her sex change.

THE young directors seem to be in rebellion against literary language. "Sarah Kane wrote very short sentences - you could even say there is no style," Warlikowski says.

"Do not look for meaning in these" is written on the train station-style flip-over indicator panels in Castellucci's A.#02, one of the most controversial plays at Avignon. Scenes showing a child crying "Mamma" as he is skinned alive by three actors, and a malicious clown urinating on other actors and wiping the stage with a goat's liver, provoked many to walk out. Little matter that the skin was latex and the clown's bladder a prosthesis.

Rodrigo García is himself directing two of the three García plays at Avignon. He is considered a virulent critic of consumer society; one of his past plays portrayed a family eating lasagne, vomiting, then smearing it over themselves.

In After Sun, an actor dressed in leather and latex pretends to sodomise a rabbit. At a press conference with García in Avignon, the director's favourite actor, Marcial Di Fonzo Bo, denounced mainstream theatre as "autistic".

"People make innocuous plays that don't bother anyone; there's no life in them. You may as well go to a museum," he said.

Pippo Delbonno is directing three of his own plays at Avignon: Silence, War and Rage (dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini). The Italian director uses physically and mentally handicapped actors, some of whom he met during his own internment in a psychiatric hospital, to denounce poverty and war. The French left tends to be sympathetic, while the right denounces Delbonno's theatre as a freakshow.

A man approached me in the rue de la République, whispering in hushed tones as if he were selling drugs. "Pardon, Madame, are you interested in the comic theatre of the absurd? I can sell you cheap tickets for this afternoon," he said.

During the festival, visitors to Avignon are constantly solicited by performers handing out fliers or playing scenes from their "Off" productions as "teasers" in the street. Around 700 unofficial, low-budget productions compete with three dozen plays and dance concerts in the "In" festival.

The "Off" was once the place to see revolutionary theatre, but today many "Off" directors opt for comedies and established authors likely to attract an audience. There is also what the promising young playwright and director Stéphanie Tesson calls "an explosion of contemporary writing". She is directing two "Off" plays at Avignon, one a comedy she wrote for children.

"It takes a huge amount of courage and financial sacrifice to be in the 'Off'," she says. "It proves that people are willing to struggle to do theatre."

Tesson has no desire to see the abrasive plays that draw so much attention to the east Europeans and Latins. "But you have to be tolerant," she adds. "There's room for all kinds of theatre, as long as it isn't too perverse."

In the trench war between "neo-brutalism" and pleasure, she has chosen the latter. Tesson sees theatre as "an escape from reality, a chance to recreate the world, a small space where life is ideal. It's not about catharsis, lessons or morality. I want a theatre that is dreamy, poetic and playful, based on love and celebration."

• The Avignon Festival continues until July 27th. Information and tickets available at www.festival-avignon.com or 00334- 90-141414.