"A friend said to me, 'Your job is to see lots of crap so we don't have to.'" He's not complaining . . . though his girlfriend, who lost five nights in a row of their Christmas holiday in Hungary to performances of five different plays by a local company. . . might be. But it has been gruelling.

"You meet somebody in Tokyo and they'll say there's a great show in Moscow. And the next week, you travel to Moscow to see it."

Tokyo was just for three nights. But that was a picnic compared to Toronto.

"I flew in to Toronto overnight, saw a show at 2am Irish time, and flew out at 6am the next morning."

Deegan took over the helm of the Dublin Theatre Festival in January. With ambitions to make the 50th anniversary festival bigger and brighter, he set about wandering the globe in search of the best companies to invite. He wasn't alone.

"There's a circuit of international programmers touring the globe all the time, and we met in festival clubs and bars and restaurants." They would exchange notes, and Deegan, whose schedule was particularly intense because of the demands of the 50th anniversary, "sort of became a hub for people: [they'd say] 'Call Loughlin, he's probably seen it.'" Deegan was new to the circuit but he found the Dublin festival to be an easy sell.

"The festival is one of the oldest and most established and most respected. I was able to attract work that other festivals weren't able to get."

This is the 50th anniversary of the first festival . . . it's not the 50th festival.

As Deegan says, "We almost lost it in its second year."

That was 1958, when Archbishop John Charles McQuaid objected to the inclusion of two "anti-Catholic" writers, James Joyce and Sean O'Casey, in the programme. The festival management obliged, the Joyce and O'Casey works were dropped, and Samuel Beckett responded by withdrawing his own play from the programme and placing a ban on any of his work being produced in Ireland.

The festival promptly collapsed, though it was revived the following year. There was no festival in either of 1974 or 1980 (the former due to changes to the seasonal scheduling of the festival, the latter due to lack of money).

"There were times when it looked like the festival would not survive, " says Deegan. "We're celebrating the achievement that the festival has been steered to this point."

The most infamous of festival controversies graced its inaugural year, 1957. The Rose Tattoo, a play by Tennessee Williams, was given its European premiere at the tiny Pike Theatre.

One night early in the run, the police arrived and arrested the director, Alan Simpson, who was charged with "presenting for gain an indecent and profane performance". He became a cause celebre and the rest of the run sold out (it had got rave reviews in the press, including the London papers) and supporters flocked to the theatre.

Anna Manahan played the leading lady. She recalls the heady atmosphere around the production. "I brought a nightdress and a toothbrush with me to the theatre each night, in case I would end up in Mountjoy."

On the night of Simpson's initial hearing, Brendan Behan was amongst the supporters who gathered in the lane outside the theatre.

"That night, my last speech was completely drowned out by Brendan in the lane singing 'The Auld Triangle'. He had a case of Guinness and was handing them out and saying, 'Drink up men and women, and keep the bottles to throw at the police.'" The play finished its run but Simpson was subsequently dragged through the courts for over a year, leading the Pike to the point of bankruptcy. He was eventually discharged, amidst heavy criticism by the judge of the garda conduct in the case.

Anna Manahan remains grateful to the festival.

"Even with all the things that happened, it catapulted me from playing all kinds of parts to being thought of as a leading lady, and I never lost that all my life.

"In the early days, there were journalists and critics that came from all over the world . . .

Washington, New York, London . . .

so that its original impact was very strong. Producers and casting directors would come from England, so playwrights and actors and directors were seen. It had wonderful offshoots.

And at that time, there were only about 400 professional actors in Dublin, so they would all be used up in the festival."

The story of that inaugural scandal will itself be told on stage this year, with a staged reading of a new play by Jocelyn Clarke based on the transcripts of Simpson's trial, The Case of the Rose Tattoo (6 and 7 October).

"Indecent and profane" were charges that raised their heads again two years ago, in response to The Bull, a dance-theatre work by Michael Keegan Dolan . . .

though this time, the charges came from Joe Duffy's listeners rather than the authorities. The Bull was the second in a "Midlands trilogy" by Keegan Dolan's Fabulous Beast company.

Two years earlier, his Giselle was the hit of the festival and threatened to launch Keegan Dolan into a stellar international career. Initial excitement amongst international producers didn't convert into concrete offers, but London's Barbican came through with vital support for The Bull and have given the third part in the trilogy, James Son of James (1-13 October), substantial backing.

The Bull was a rollicking and irreverent updating of the early Irish saga Tain Bo Cuailnge, part satire on contemporary Ireland, part homage to the land and its mythical history. It featured extensive violence and, as some saw it, "gratuitous" nudity.

Keegan Dolan is adamant he had, and has, no interest in stoking the fires of outrage in the letters pages and on Liveline. "I'm just doing what I'm trying to do, " he says. Nonetheless, for the third instalment, he has made something "extremely different".

Inspired by the Dogme film collective, he drafted a manifesto to guide the process of making it, to set "creative limitations" on the "vastness" of his blank canvass. And amongst them "there'll be no foul language, there'll be no graphic violence".

He won't discuss the thematics of James, but says of his state of mind, "I feel like a pregnant donkey; I feel ready to drop it now." Whatever he eventually drops, it will be worth catching.

Sebastian Barry similarly disavows any deliberate intent to court controversy, yet his last new play on the Irish stage, 2002's Hinterland, was savaged in some quarters of the media for what was seen as a perilously thin, and crude, fictionalisation of Charles Haughey's story (Barry has always been adamant that he was not attempting to depict Haughey). He is dealing with contemporary Ireland again in his new play, Pride of Parnell Street, but it is both more personal and less political.

For seven years, Barry and his wife lived in the basement of David Norris's house on North Great George's St, around the corner from Parnell St, back "before the Nigerians came and spruced up the shops". They were "middle-class people living in a community that was beginning to be lots of different things", he recalls. He noticed at the time that, on the great days of Irish victories in the World Cup, the local women's refuges would be full the day after. Pride of Parnell Street is "about a couple whose progress in lifef is halted by that", says Barry. "It's kind of a love story backwards, or a real love story."

It's also very much a play about Dublin and Barry's feelings for the city. He calls it "a homecoming" and, writing it, retrieved a memory of something he "had buried for 30 years. . .

Coming out of Trinity when bombs exploded in 1974 and seeing something which I couldn't understand what it was, which was a piece of a body." (In the play, he gives that memory to a character. ) Given the reception Hinterland received, is Barry at all nervous about returning to the Dublin stage? "If I thought thoughts about it, they were erased by the opening night [in London]." The play opened at the Tricycle in early September; in the Guardian, Lyn Gardner said it was "performed with exquisite restraint" and left "hardly a dry eye in the house" at the end.

"There's lots of things to fear in life, real things, " says Barry, implying . . . very politely . . . that critics aren't one of them.

Dublin also features in one of the more idiosyncratic shows in the festival programme, Kebab (29 September to 6 October).

This is the English translation of a hit Romanian play about Romanians in Dublin. Loughlin Deegan discovered it about the same time as the Royal Court in London, and the result is a coproduction of the Englishlanguage premiere.

v 17"What's remarkable is how absent Ireland and Irish people are in it, " says Deegan. "It's probably the ultimate criticism of the way Ireland is engaging with the new wave of immigration that's happening."

Dublin and immigration are also core themes in the Abbey's landmark contribution to the festival, previewed here recently, The Playboy of the Western World.

Roddy Doyle and Nigerian theatre practitioner Bisi Adigun have relocated Synge's play to a modern-day bar off the M50, with Nigerians playing the roles of Christy Mahon and his da.

When prompted to choose his favourite shows from the international programme, Deegan demurs, but says he will point people towards shows he loved but thinks might be outside many people's "comfort zones".

The Katona Jozsef Theatre, an ensemble from Hungary, brings a "really exquisite" production of Chekov's Ivanov. Sankai Juku are Japan's premier Butoh dance company and "one of the world's most established international companies". Their Hibiki is an "almost spiritual work". And the 7 Fingers from Montreal are "possibly five of the most talented young people you will ever see in your lives". They bring Traces: "Circus meet postdramatic theatre meets performance artf a young and funky show, " says Deegan.

On the programme is also one of the legendary international theatres, Peter Brook's Theatre des bouffes du Nord from Paris.

They bring two productions, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, The Grand Inquisitor (10-14 October) and a collection of Beckett shorts entitled Fragments (9-14 October). They will play in the Tivoli and, with both productions just one hour long, they are scheduled together to each be seen in one night.

Brook's long-time collaborator, Marie Helene Estienne, says it had been originally suggested that they would play at the Gate.

"We said, 'No, we can't compete.'

We just wanted to be modest, to present our own, truthful approach to Beckett." She speaks of approaching the short plays "in a very pure way" that is very different from usual, and says it will be "very exciting" to see how the plays are received in Dublin.

For Dublin audiences, it will be almost as exciting to see Brook himself, now 82, who will give a public interview on 8 October.

Brook's contemporary, Anna Manahan, recalls how Cyril Cusack once said to her of their profession, "We've got the key to a secret garden." All changed, changed utterly. She saw the X Factor recently. "I was in shock and horror when I saw these people, absolutely hysterical."

Now, "celebrity nonsense" dominates the profession.

"They'd sell their mother to get their face on screen."

But there is an alternative to the celebrity obsession, and Loughlin Deegan has seen it. He thrills at "the number of enormously intelligent young adults that are dedicating their lives to the [theatre] project". He may be exhausted by his intercontinental travel, and worn down by "ridiculously theatrical anxiety dreams" as his first festival in charge approaches, but, under it all, he's energised.

"I'm ridiculously optimistic about the power of theatre and the strength of theatre . . . I think it continues to rejuvenate itself."