At half-past three on a Sunday afternoon, outside the Olympia Theatre in Dublin's Dame Street, a scrum of bodies is masquerading as an orderly queue.

Despite appearances, the rammy isn't a result of some reality TV teen sensation about to appear on the Olympia stage. It is instead down to the Galway-based Druid theatre company's new productions of two very different plays by veteran Irish playwright Tom Murphy.

Druid's revival of Bailegangaire, which the company first presented in 1985, was itself a mighty enough proposition for this year's Dublin Theatre Festival (DTF), which ended last weekend. A tale of a senile old woman telling a story she refuses to finish as her two grand-daughters navigate their lives around her has become a modern classic. Paired with a new play, Brigit, a prequel of sorts featuring the characters from Bailegangaire 30 years earlier, it becomes an even more tantalising prospect.

The President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, thinks so too. A few minutes before the curtain goes up on Brigit, the crowds part in the foyer of the Olympia as Mr Higgins arrives for a brief photocall with Murphy, DTF director Willie White and other dignitaries.

Such a buzz around Druid's presentations of Murphy's work is symptomatic of just how much Dublin Theatre Festival has become the epicentre of a year-round arts and culture programme that brings the city to such vivid life. Founded in 1957 by impresario Brendan Smith, DTF is now Europe's longest-running specialised theatre festival, and has grown to become a major showcase for Ireland's burgeoning theatre scene as well as featuring international work.

At the Little Museum over the road from St Stephen's Green, an exhibition curated by White titled Encore! charts DTF's history through displays of posters, programmes, set models, letters and other ephemera. The programme for the Field Day company's 1980 debut production of Brian Friel's Translations is there, as are playbills for numerous works by Murphy, Druid and a roll call of great Irish writers and companies.

This year there were more than 20 productions at DTF, including the Schaubuhne Berlin's production of Hamlet and a mini Australian season, as well as a family programme. Of the Irish work, one of the hottest tickets was for The Corn Exchange's stage version of Eimear McBride's novel A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing.

Both of Murphy's plays, meanwhile, featured towering performances from Irish acting legend Marie Mullen as Mommo. In Brigit, Mullen played support to Bosco Hogan as Seamus, who, tasked to carve a statue of Saint Brigit after the existing one is broken by a young nun, has something woken in him that goes beyond mere craftsmanship.

What follows is a wry critique of how art can be interfered with by bureaucrats who would prefer to make their masterpieces more user-friendly.

This in turn sheds some light on the internal psychological workings of Bailegangaire, in which Mullen plays the now bed-bound Mommo in a performance that carried Garry Hynes's production.

Over at the Abbey Theatre, Mark O'Rowe's Our Few And Evil Days looked at even more extreme family tensions in O'Rowe's own production of his new play.

Our Few And Evil Days opens on the night Adele is bringing her new boyfriend Dennis home to meet her mum and dad, played by Sinead Cusack and Ciaran Hinds. Adele, alas, is on a rescue mission to provide emotional support for her best friend. In her absence, initial conversational niceties seem to reveal nothing. Only later do the cracks start to show, as a set of revelations that affect the entire family are laid bare.

O'Rowe's writing is a deadly mix of the ordinary and the frighteningly strange as it delves deep into notions of truth, lies, love, healing and what it takes to keep a family together, however damaged.

The text's overlapping rhythms are delivered exquisitely by the entire cast, with Adele played by rising star Charlie Murphy, who features on the cover of the current edition of Irish Tatler. Such a glossy image is a long way from the troublesome can of worms O'Rowe uncovers in a work that shocks with the power of the darkest of psychological thrillers.

Patrick Mason's production of Hugo Hamilton's new play, The Mariner, over at the Gate Theatre, did something similar. The mystery here comes in the form of a wounded naval officer during the First World War who may or may not have stolen the identity of a dead man.

With a welter of First World War plays around just now, Mason invested Hamilton's script with a stylistic elegance that took a leap beyond mere elegy to become a far more intriguing prospect.

As with Brigit, a broken statue was the starting point for Vardo, the latest site-specific dissection of Dublin's hidden underbelly by Anu Productions. Having charted 100 years of life on the edge of the city's Foley Street district in World's End Lane, Laundry and The Boys of Foley Street, the company's fourth and final part of the Monto Cycle looks at the brutal world of enforced prostitution among East European migrants.

Accosted outside the Oonagh Young Gallery by a young woman with a chipped and stolen sacred heart statue in her shopping trolley, an audience of four were led into a pub where the young woman's sister was celebrating her release from prison. Already accessories to the apparent crime, we were then taken to the nearby bus station, where a woman was trying to escape from her pimp. Upstairs, a Nigerian refugee told his story, before we were bundled into the back of a car and taken to a flat where young women look us in the eye from across the kitchen table and tell us what men do to them.

It is this one-to-one intimacy that made the audience so uncomfortably complicit in these matter-of-fact exchanges in a piece which hid in plain sight of a passing public who chose not to notice what was happening under their noses. Such a cutting-edge approach is just one aspect of a carefully crafted festival that this year was firing on all cylinders.

Over at Encore!, there's a quote on the wall from Fergus Linehan, who ran DTF between 2000 and 2004, and has just taken over the artistic leadership of Edinburgh International Festival. The quote seems to both sum up the spirit of Dublin while boding well for the future of Edinburgh.

"Growing a festival or deepening its relationship with the audience," it says, "is the result of hundreds of things done well rather than flashes of bravado."

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