In the Wooster Group's Emperor Jones, Kate Valk strides about the stage in full, "bootblack" make-up, her face a series of expressions of comic book obviousness, her voice a honking, vaudeville parody of a negro dialect. The use of this stereotype, or mask - a fascinating theatrical tradition dating back to the mid-1700s - is still so loaded that the Group lost funding from the New York State Council for the Arts in the early 1980s, for using "harsh and caricatured portrayals of a racial minority". But it is astonishing that such a body could be so blind. The mask not only points up the superficiality of racial difference, it plugs us, like it or not, into the mains of our memories of racism. Did I really have a chocolate-coloured, half-eejit of a puppet with a hinged mouth, and did I really make him sing "I've been to Alabama . . . ?"
The play tells the story of a black train porter, who sets himself up as an "emperor" on a remote Caribbean island, until the natives rise up and turn against him. For an Irish audience, conscious that O'Neill was a first generation Irish-American, there are many layers of recognition in this story of hopeless revolution and inevitable self-destruction; watching the play in Belfast makes the comment on the nature of colonialism and racism seem all the more pointed.
The dilapidated Crescent Arts Centre is a far cry from the studio theatre of the gleaming Waterfront Hall, but there was an electrifying performance to be enjoyed here too. Antrim-born Owen O'Neill was nominated for a Perrier Comedy Award at Edinburgh in the early 1990s, but his last show to play there was deemed "too theatrical" to be considered by the judges.
The fact is that O'Neill doesn't seem to care too much about form as long as he can stay at the centre of his own truth and passion. While Shouting from the Scaffold, written from experience, was a terrifyingly bleak portrayal of the lives of Irish labourers on London building sites, the Perrier-blocked Off My Face was an honest exploration of O'Neill's own alcoholism.
Lorca: The Urban Nightmare of a Poet, was devised and written for O'Neill by David Johnston, as a Belfast Festival commission, and it sees him telling the bare facts of Lorca's cruel struggle, as a homosexual, against prejudice and hatred. Andrea de Silva, in livid red, gave the show simple, dignified bursts of flamenco dance, while John Flanigan provided the flourishes of guitar and Suzanne McCloskey made her piano stretch from Andalucia to the speakeasys of 1920s New York.
Johnston and O'Neill make a compelling connection between the vice-grip of fundamentalism in the Northern Ireland of their own youth and the Andalucia of Lorca's youth - "It was like living in a country run by a joint dictatorship of Sinn Fein and the DUP". Lorca's problem, as articulated here, was that: "He lived on one of history's faultlines".
A slow and tentative healing of that faultline, and an opening up to the confidence of peace is immediately obvious to the Southern visitor to Belfast these days - the Protestant taxi-driver, extremely friendly even by the high standards of Belfast taxi-drivers, went to touching lengths to compliment Dublin when he heard our accents. And for the first time I could actually see that the Belfast Festival might have a role to play in this opening-up process.
"I never shy away from statements like that," says out-going festival director Sean Doran. "A festival should be open-ended in its ambitions. For instance, putting on Purcarete's Oresteia was like putting up a mirror to the society. This audience is looking at it on two levels, the way other audiences can't. It's about trying to find a way to a new justice, a new democracy - and there's the realisation, `hold on, we're half-an-hour from the end here'. " He adds: "If you're from here, you all have a responsibility to change it."
Two years ago, before Doran came on the scene, a brief visit to the festival gave me the impression that its programme, and its mostly south Belfast location, served only to confirm the happy position of Belfast's largely Protestant middle-class. Doran admits that the first thing he did when he got the brief was decide he wasn't going to programme the Royal Shakespeare Company, who had been bringing their wares, whether good or bad, to the festival for years. "It wasn't the Royal Shakespeare Company - it's what they came to represent. Then there was the lovely irony in that I ended up programming them this year, but doing Beckett, not Shakespeare. I was really after production values - that's why the Wooster Group's here." Ticket sales in this, Doran's second year, show a huge advance on last year's: "That's the great thing that's happened - we've sold the risk. The audience is buying the risk. Some people say we're going to split our audience - but that's how it's going to grow."
The new "morning coffee concerts" at the Elmwood Hall have been a hit, but, on the evidence of Saturday's wonderful concert of Schumann Lieder by the young English tenor, Ian Bostridge and the pianist, Julius Drake, most of the audience is in late middle age. There was unintentional comedy at the interval when the promised sherry supply could not be located, and a forlorn queue filed past a table of empty glasses. At Stranmillis College, the English company DV8 has been the hit of a strong dance programme, and has attracted the young in droves. Enter Achilles bears the chilling tag "controversial", but it is also a very beautiful and acrobatically performed exploration of male, stag-party mentality. Dance is the perfect medium to explore the brutish physicality of the pack - two dancers roll on the floor, for instance, and are like lovers one minute, but like brawlers the next, because violence and fear always isolate the players in the end.
Doran sums up the achievement of the last two years with the word "redress". He deliberately programmed big names, he says, because "those people coming here gives the festival credibility". When it looked as if Willem Dafoe would not be coming with the Wooster Group, the response was "Och, I knew he wasn't going to come," says Doran; but he did.
So he purposely wanted to bump up the event from the level of a provincial British festival? "Yes. I don't think that's arrogant." If he had stayed on, he would have concentrated on integrating the festival much more with the city, he says.
So why on earth is he going to the furthest antipodes - Perth, Australia, to be precise - to run a festival there instead? What allowed him to accept the offer to run this huge festival, with its staff of 17 and its budget of 17.5 million Aussie dollars (£7.65 million), was the fact that he could not get his job at the Belfast Festival made full-time: "Three years on a part-time contract and no assistant - that's not commitment".
What made him "torn", he says, was the feeling that he hadn't finished the job he set out to do. He is worried that there is no new festival director in place now, learning from the experience of this festival, and hopes the event will not "slip back". He wishes that the festival had a board independent of Queen's University, which has supported it from the beginning, and is surprised the funding bodies don't step in to move the festival forward: "I'm surprised there's not intervention. Really, they should say, `hold on, boys, do we value what we have here? Do we want a small festival . . ?' "
" . . . for middle-class Protestants in late middle-age . . . " "You said that, not me", he laughs and continues: "Or are we about thinking big, taking risks?"
The Belfast Festival continues until Sunday. To book, telephone: Belfast 665577.
