This is the year I came to terms with the Galway Arts Festival. Until last year, I was routinely amazed by the audacity of it: the turreted blue tent in the field under the summer skies, the colour and crush of Macnas winding through the medieval streets, sitting in cleared parking lots looking at world-class physical theatre, and all in a city cut by the rushing Corrib and opening onto the sea.

Last year was, for me and for many people, the year of the backlash. The parade lacked action. They mounted a show called Kad-

dish, which left most people bewildered and cold. Who were they kidding, inviting us to this city where you couldn't budge for lager-swilling louts?

Now, as the festival looks forward to celebrating 21 years next year, I, at least, am ready to be more mature about it. It's here to stay. Some things will be good, some will not. With Druid and Macnas, it has helped shape modern Galway. Surely this gives the festival a responsibility to consider critical issues for the city, such as planning, development, architecture and transport? . Having made that point, I can surrender to the traditional, goodtime, festival model which its new director, Ted Turton, has adopted: "I wanted variety, an eclectic mix, like when it was small. That was my number one target."

And so, in true, carnival style, the festival-goer should be ready for new and sometimes unasked for experiences, which spark ideas and sudden realisations, such as these:

I had completely forgotten what theatre is about. Having seen

Teatr Biuro Podrozy's Carmen Funebre last year in Edinburgh, I

decided I wouldn't bother going again, and only changed tack when I

discovered it would fit between two other shows. And was confronted by the fact that the point of theatre is that it is different every time. The Polish company lit up an arena of old Spanish Arch buildings, as with torches, flares, candles, music and enormous stilts, they performed their "funeral song", a powerful protest against war: burning houses carried into the night sky by balloons, hobbling men shaking boxes and the triumphant figure of Death, a skull on stilts, are all it leaves.

Which prompted another thought: why does Macnas seem so afraid to tackle pain in its street shows? In countries where there is a tradition of joyful processions in the streets, there is also one of processions of grief - and we certainly have enough cause.

Bulgaria's Credo Theatre's adaptation of Gogol's The Coat, in the

Black Box, slowly and delicately built a moving picture of a small man, crushed by circumstances, whose only vestige of self respect, a new coat, is taken away from him. This is the prototypical clown figure, and Nina Dimitrova and Vassil Vassilev-Zuek, are clowns, illusionists and puppeteers of the first order. What was most fascinating, however, was their relationship with Russian culture, so similar to our relationship with British culture - extremely intimate, and yet faintly mocking: "I swear," announces Vassilev-Zuek at one point, "in the name of Wodka . . ."

That's the foreigners for you, so inventive. Hello? Is that a completely new, completely different theatrical experience I have just had, or have Corcadorca administered hallucinogens at the box office? Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs, which packed them in late-night at

Nun's Island, is the tale of a contemporary Corkonian Cathy and

Heathcliff, Pig and Runt, caught in a limiting, violent pact against the rest of the world. In Aedin Cosgrove's glinting pig-pen, director Pat Kiernan conjures worlds, and even wombs, from just two bare chairs, and coaxes quite phenomenal performances from Cillian

Murphy and Eileen Walsh. Runt climbs painfully out of the pact and towards the light, in an allegorical struggle against ghettoes, and perhaps against the solipsism of the southern capital.

The couple's Cork-based idiolect stretches to great lyricism - it is heart-rending to hear the abandoned yobbo, Pig, speak of a woman's soft dress: "Like some little fedder that fall outa de sky from a birdie that fly by." The show goes to Edinburgh and London in the coming months, and in November will come back to Dublin, and also to

Belfast, with Cork dates still to be announced.

I don't like stand-up comedy. This was one of the less enlightening realisations Galway provided this year. Jo Brand's show at the Black Box played one note almost right through: I'm a big, fat woman pushing 40 and no-one fancies me, so I get them back. Every now and again she hits areas of pain, like an ageing woman's desire for a baby, but she never explores them. The only real moment of comedy for me was the good, old fashioned absurdity of a girl wearing a sanitary towel over her head, loops around her ears, when she has her first period.

Her show remains at the level of a reactive, counter-attack against "The Establishment". In this attack she uses shock tactics too, which make you laugh before you know why. Her support, Andy

Robinson, used these tactics at a much baser level, stooping as low as sex with children, Grandad's asthma and blindness for his shocks

(though there was a great moment of unintentional comedy when he asked did anyone know any primary teachers and one member of the audience commented helpfully, "No, but I know some.") His show was typical of much stand-up, in being a macho duel with the audience: if the audience laughs, the comic has shot first.

I like stand-up comedy. A day later. Tommy Tiernan, who played at the King's Head, is a story-teller, at ease with pathos and absurdism, and no-one wins any duel: "I am aware as I'm telling these stories that they don't all have punch-lines," he said at one point.

"You hate the English, don't you?" Jo Brand said in her show. I

hope not. But Malcolm McLaren's riveting lecture, "Living Yesterday

Tomorrow" in the Town Hall Theatre on Sunday night made me realise that I have not really understood their culture. The shock-tactics of anti-Establishment English comedy are - like the shock-tactics of the

Swastika T-shirts or Sex Pistols, both bands that were stage-managed by McLaren - part of a tradition of subversion going back to Oscar

Wilde and beyond (attention letter writers: I know he was Irish).

This form of subversion is only possible and only necessary in societies, like that of Britain, with a powerful established order.

In two-and-a-half hours of non-stop story-telling, McLaren spun his version of his life, with just cigarettes and a slide-projector that he couldn't work as props. "I am," he said, "a total product of that art school world of the 1960s. I'm sort of too English, and that's probably why the English hate me."

His desire was Dadaist and Nihilist: to defeat the commercial

Establishment, and to this end he did things like dressing up a band of innocent Americans called The New York Dolls in red, and insisting they had the word "red" six times in every song, just after the

Vietnam War (when asked was he a communist, the lead singer fenced:

"Yeah. Yawanna make somethin' of it?").

Shock tactics are ultimately limited because they are just reactive, however, a fact which McLaren did not address. And they only thrive when they attract the notice of the Establishment.

McLaren's anti-commercialism did not convince, as holes opened in the web of his story: why put a nude 13year-old on an album cover? How could Adam Ant, whom McLaren nurtured, have sprung from the music of

Africa, explored by McLaren in the music library at Beaubourg?

(That's an old British anti-establishment trick - look for salvation in an exotic, "innocent" culture.) There have been many other realisations, some sublime, some ridiculous. In the latter category:

young people today are as gullible as we were: Ocean Colour Scene, standing like the card-board cut-out I have of the Monkees, complete with jaunty caps and a Trinity of guitars, flailing and thrashing merrily, seemed to do the business. In the sublime: Irish myths have a breathtaking power: Macdara Mac Uibh Aille's, in The Voice Of The

Sea, may have lost the its audience of children as it explored the death of an island community, but he cast a spell when he animated myth with the skill of a real story-teller.

THE puppeteer's character can be foregrounded in a puppet-show:

Pat Bracken and Annette Moore did not disappear behind their beautiful glove puppets, and their exquisite shadow puppets, in The

Emperor and the Nightingale (but they need to develop stronger story lines). There is still an audience for strong, narrative-based, psychological drama in Irish: the Taibhdhearc's Haiku, developed by director Chiyomi Yamashita, explored the tensions between a mother and two daughters, one autistic, and with the gift of composing Haiku poetry. Maire Stafford's strength as the mother showed up a certain underdevelopment in the characterisation of the two daughters, and the set is poor, sometimes naturalistic, sometimes not, but this is still well worth catching at the Lyric, Belfast, and the Peacock,

Dublin, in September.

That's how things look to me this morning. But the festival runs until next weekend, and the best I can hope for it is that these ideas will lie mangled or trashed in the bin of memory by stronger, better ones before the week is out.

On Thursday Brian Fallon reports on the Galway Arts Festival's visual arts programme. Fur- ther information on all festival events from (LoCall) 1890 566577.

A powerful protest against war: the Polish show Carmen Funebre.

Bulgaria's Credo Theatre in an adapatation of Gogol's The Coat.