Kilkenny Arts Festival

Various venues, Kilkenny Until Aug 14 11-15 056-7752175 kilkennyarts.ie

It’s Tom Creed’s last blast in the Marble City as curator of the Kilkenny Arts Festival’s theatre and dance programme. To conclude, this year’s festival furthers Creed’s balance between international visitors and Irish artists, stretching performance beyond traditional venues and forms and delivering a sum of experiences to reflect the intimacy and hidden niches of Kilkenny in summer.

This year features two Irish premieres from previous festival visitors. Una McKevitt follows Victor and Gord with the development of her documentary craft in The Big Deal, a moving and sometimes stunning piece about two people undergoing sex-change operations, based on interviews and correspondences.

Meanwhile, globe-trotting Beckett specialists Gare St Lazare Players add to their repertoire with Title and Deed, a specially written new play for Conor Lovett by Brooklyn-based writer Will Eno.

Those who have not yet spent an intimate hour with the fearless, compelling Eileen Walsh in Corcadorca's Request Programmecan temporarily flat-share with her somewhere in the city.

But for bracing epic verse and mega-yuks, New York outfit Banana Bag and Bodice can't be beaten for its rock'n'roll cabaret version of an Old English standby in the divinely titled Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage. A fitting salute as Creed, now installed at Cork Midsummer Festival, packs his own.

Can't see that? Catch thisTHEATREclub Stole Your Clock Radio What the Fuck You Gonna Do About It? Project Arts Centre, Dublin