Losing much of its budget prompted the Belfast Festival to go for a crowd-pleasing programme. The policy has paid off handsomely, writes Jane Coyle

It has been a Belfast Festival like no other. Significantly underfunded, lacking both a full-scale orchestral concert and a major piece of international theatre, its programme described as slight and dumbed down, it has, nevertheless, broken box-office records and connected across a range of art forms with constituencies of new and lapsed festival customers.

The programme puts the whole thing in a nutshell. Double the normal print run was produced on unpretentious newsprint by the Belfast Telegraph, which distributed 120,000 copies with the newspaper on the day of the launch. Hardly a thing of beauty, it has been hugely successful in delivering the Belfast Festival at Queen's into the hands of the public. In the spirit of cutting one's coat according to the cloth available, practicality and pragmatism have been the orders of the day all round.

Stella Hall, the event's director, says that, when it came to programming, she had stark choices to make. The omens were definitely not with her. Back in the spring, Guinness announced it was withdrawing €75,000, half of its long-standing annual sponsorship of the festival. Then came two more hammer blows, when the Northern Ireland Events Company axed the €150,000 it had contributed in 2002 and financial backing from the lottery fund of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland fell 50 per cent short of the required amount.

"It is crystal clear to me what are going to be popular events and what appeals to niche audiences," says Hall. "This year we simply didn't have the funds to do niche work. I was left with two choices: to put on a programme of the kind of challenging, high-profile work that I would dearly love to present or do a wide-ranging, popular programme.

"Only I know those shows that I had to say no to. During the year I went to Canada to see \ Lepage, I went to Perth and Sydney, I went to St Petersburg. I saw many wonderful pieces that I could have brought to Belfast, but I had to turn them down - for the moment.

"This year has been very much a case of survival. We have put on a different kind of programme from what people have come to expect, but it has paid rich dividends. I am not in the least surprised at its success, but I am surprised by the level of that success.

"I am hoping that there will be a recognition of what we can achieve on such limited resources and that our partners will grasp the nettle and argue that the Belfast festival is important to us. What we have given the city this year is a local festival with popular appeal, but without proper funding it can't be the major international event it aspires to be."

The drama-and-dance programme was hit hard by both financial restrictions and bad luck.

Despite the absence of the kind of innovative international names that have produced ripples of excitement at previous festivals, there had been considerable local satisfaction at the initial inclusion of two premières by Belfast-based companies.

But it was soon announced that Kabosh's Irish première of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street had been called off, as Karl Wallace, its director, had fallen ill.

And worse was to come when, on the morning of the first preview of Gary Mitchell's new comedy, Deceptive Imperfections, North Face Theatre Company cancelled its festival run and subsequent tour, again because of sickness.

And so theatre buffs were left to search elsewhere for treats. They found one at the Grand Opera House in the shape of the Royal National Theatre's glorious Vincent In Brixton. Beautifully acted and persuasively directed by Richard Eyre, Nicholas Wright's speculative dramatisation of the three formative years spent in London by Vincent van Gogh presented a love story of unexpected emotional and erotic force. The one lingering regret is that more people did not turn out to see it, possibly because of understated marketing.

There was fun of a very different kind at the Lyric Theatre, which this year did not stage its own production but did present the festival's Colours of the World theme with full force.

The loud, mad, over-the-top world of Bollywood came to town with Sohaila Kapur's cheesy musical Yeh Hai Mumbai Meri Jaan (The Bombay Of My Dreams), which was described by one enthusiastic customer as like Austin Powers in a sari.

While the uninitiated gaped and blinked at the corniness of the humour and the songs, members of the city's Indian community roared with laughter, thrilled that a piece of their homeland's vivid culture had found its way to Belfast.

There was a cacophony of shouting, clapping and stamping the next three nights, as crowds of young people, many of them clearly making their first visits to a theatre, put their hands together for the hot, gritty hip hop of Students Of The Asphalt Jungle. Puremovement's 11 black male dancers were as cool a bunch of brothers as this audience would ever have encountered, and there was a palpable respect for their portrayals of life on the hard streets of Philadelphia.

Last Sunday the Lyric was the venue for home-grown crack and diversion, as the poet Gearoid MacLochlainn, the singer Alan Burke and the mighty Sligo band Dervish brought to a close the superb month-long Open House traditional- music festival, in a capacity concert organised with the Belfast Festival at Queen's.

In an unadorned performance space at Belfast Institute of Further and Higher Education, just off the unfashionable end of the Newtownards Road, Birmingham's DanceXchange company presented the aptly named Bare Bones. Six attractive young dancers performed a series of new solos, duets and ensemble pieces, one of which - Tautology, by William Tuckett - is surely destined to be expanded into something longer and even more haunting and unsettling.

The organisers went out of their way to up the ante for family events, an area Hall believes has the potential for further imaginative development. The festival opened with the spectacular Sticky, a colourful 100-foot tower of sticky tape, complete with fairies and fantasy creatures, erected beside the river in the Botanic Gardens as 6,000 people watched in wonder.

A rather unusual world première required wellies and waterproofs for a trip deep into Badger's Wood in Stranmillis, where Kernal Trapps Puppets presented the delightful Tellers House. Less cosy were the the five minutes of confusion, disorientation and panic in the pitch darkness of the Black Maze, installed in a huge lorry outside the Old Museum Arts Centre.

Although children bounded out grinning with glee, their adult companions emerged pale-faced and wobbly-kneed after their solitary stumblings through a potentially inescapable tangle of dead ends.

Warm clothes and a comforting tot of something in the back pocket came in handy for a trip through Belfast Harbour into the developing Titanic Quarter. Where better to site Rita Duffy's new iceberg installation, made during her recent trip to Newfoundland? Icebergs and Titanic have a spooky association, of course, even more so when Duffy completes her artistic quest to tow an iceberg to Belfast. The space neatly doubled up for a reading of Stewart Parker's radio play The Iceberg, directed by Carol Moore and with a cast that included Ian McElhinney, David Gorry and Miche Doherty.

Belfast's newest visual-arts venue, the renovated warehouse that is Cotton Court, was the setting for Cultural Colours, a pithy, witty collection of muscular sculptures in wood and bronze by Raymond Watson. The pieces fan out from a granite-mounted circle of bronze casts, entitled Hands Of History, made from the hands that signed the Belfast Agreement. Great fun was to be had in trying to work out whose was whose - and why.

Upstairs, the renowned artist David Mach was on a two-week residency at Belfast Print Workshop, where he created an impressive body of prints, albeit on a rather more modest scale than his usual massive paper sculptures and public installations.

As orchestra-in-residence to the festival, the Ulster Orchestra has found itself in some unusual company, not least playing alongside Brian Kennedy, Cara Dillon, Anúna and Liam O'Flynn in the rather quizzically regarded sell-out opening concert.

They shared the honours with the Scottish singer Eddi Reader, formerly of Fairground Attraction, in a highly praised evening that featured Reader's interpretations of the songs of Robert Burns, as well as a selection of the Irish Rhythms, arranged more than 50 years ago by the legendary David Curry and his orchestra.

This evening the magnificent, historic Clonard Monastery, just off the Falls Road, will be the setting for an event the musicians are relishing: a performance of the powerful music of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

And so, as proceedings draw to a close, you sense that Belfast Festival at Queen's is at a crossroads in its eventful 41-year-old life. Hall acknowledges this to be the case, but she is characteristically doughty as she looks to the future.

"I believe that Belfast has at last come to love this festival, but that love now has to be translated into real, tangible support for its continuation," she says. "We have much to be proud of, particularly at the box office. Last year the average customer bought 2.4 tickets. This year the average booking has been for between four and five shows. At the halfway mark we had reached 115 per cent of our target, and even on the first day we had sold more tickets than during the whole of last year's festival.

"I feel as though I have got the template right now and that there is indisputable value in maintaining our cross-art focus, offering more choices and giving people the opportunity to dip into the festival from a broader base.

"Belfast City Council has put in place a strategy called the City of Festivals, and we welcome that initiative very strongly. We will be tightening up our role as the autumn festival. If there is to be a necklace of festival jewels strung around the city throughout the year, we will be wearing the raindrop on the leaf in autumn."

Belfast Festival at Queen's runs until Sunday. See www.belfastfestival.com