theartsdesk in Belfast: Scenes from the 48th Belfast Festival

In National Anthem, the debut play by bestselling novelist Colin Bateman, a composer lies prostrate on the floor. Half hungover, half waiting for inspiration, he has been commissioned to co-write an anthem for Northern Ireland with a poet and has a day to do it before flying back to his continental tax haven. The ad-hoc alliance soon fractures as differences emerge. One is Catholic, passionate and pretentious, one has sold his Protestant soul to MOR rock and platinum sales. Can the two sides work in harmony?

As metaphors for the divisions in modern Ireland go this is pretty straightforward, but Bateman, probably best known for creating TV police series Murphy's Law, injects a brittle, black sense of humour into the familiar scenario. On discussing local heroes they come up with George Best, Alex "Hurricane" Higgins and Bobby Sands: "Two drunks and an eating disorder."

As composer Gary Miller (Stuart Graham) and poet Dessie O'Hare (Miche Doherty, pictured right with Alan McKee) shoot the breeze while waiting for inspiration, their pasts revisit them. Their lives have been overshadowed by the Troubles and soon the Troubles come back to haunt them in the shape of a man dressed as a badger and a large box delivered to their office. Is it a bomb? Or is it a gift from their benevolent sponsors? Bateman's piece has a fierce relevance for the Belfast audience. It also has a neat, sitcom-ish streak of absurdism. It is not every day you see a drama where the villain wears a badger costume.

This year's two-week Belfast Festival, the 48th, sponsored by Ulster Bank, has mainly avoided such bidding for laughs, however. Last year there was stand-up comedy in a Spiegeltent, but this year the emphasis has been unashamedly about going upmarket, ranging from films to new opera Postcards from Dumbworld, to conceptual artist Nic Green's acclaimed Trilogy, in which female audience members were invited to disrobe and join the naked cast; from the inventive rock of Imogen Heap to talks by writers Roddy Doyle and Joseph O'Connor. Michael Palin did add some inevitable levity, but the festival's director Graeme Farrow felt vindicated by the box-office results, pointing to the fact that more people bought tickets for these productions than bought tickets for Lady Gaga's recent visit. Which goes to show you can prove anything with figures.

It has helped, of course, that some of the visiting productions had proven pulling power. The National Theatre's touring production of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art made a welcome stopover at the Grand Opera House. Bennett's play-rehearsal-within-a-play about an imagined encounter in Oxford between W H Auden (Desmond Barrit) and Benjamin Britten (Malcolm Sinclair) remains a smart skewering of the thespian profession while movingly probing the very nature of what makes an artist. Do creative types need to create? Or does art just become, as the scrotum-faced Auden claims, a habit? While this is not quite as fully rounded as The History Boys, it still bursts with ideas, opinions and, most of all, memorable lines: Auden is not just Oxford's Professor of Poetry, he is also a master of putting "knobs in gobs", as Bennett poetically puts it.

On my first day in Belfast the city was flooded by a non-stop rainstorm. On my second the sun shone and I managed to get to an exhibition. Siobhan Hapaska is a Belfast-born artist who studied at Goldsmiths College around the same time as Damien Hirst but clearly has less of a nose for self-publicity. Her work, however, is similarly eye-catching. In Downfall, at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, her fondness for David Cronenberg-like juxtapositions of nature and science was striking. The Dog That Lost its Nose resembled a giant Newton's Cradle, albeit with balls covered in animal hair which evoked the kangaroo testicles eaten on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here... Another piece featured an olive tree suspended horizontally over two trays, one containing dead earth, one containing plant-life. The symbolism was intended to represent Palestine and Israel, but in this still divided but now peaceful city there was an added frisson.

Through a combination of canny programming and serendipity, many events had a local resonance. Peter Hain's talk on Nelson Mandela was about apartheid-era South Africa, but it could not help ringing bells. Likewise National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch (pictured left), staged at the Girls' Model School in North Belfast: Gregory Burke's intense, immersive piece, due to return to the Barbican in London in November, might have been set in Iraq, but the sight of Scottish squaddies clearly brought back memories for older audience members. This was never more the case than when one of the characters compared Iraqi insurgents to the IRA, with the IRA coming off better because at least they did not use suicide bombers.

My last outing featured another prostrate performer. Brisbane-based ensemble Circa were billed as "new circus", but their work feels closer to modern dance than it does to Cirque du Soleil's juggling hippy gymnastics, with the emphasis constantly on the nature of bodies in space. A shirtless man flipped and jerked across the stage before rising to perform some miraculous acrobatics alongside the rest of the quintet. The ensemble of three men and two women were superfit in every sense, throwing themselves around with an enviable mix of grace and huge abandon.

It was a sexy show, too. One of the men did not have a six-pack; it was more like an 18-pack. One female performer donned red killer heels and literally walked over another man, a high-glamour version of the Indian bed-of-nails trick. You could read all sorts of post-feminist guff into this, but I think they do it just because they can. One of the women also slides her impossibly bendy body through a tiny hoop – terrific, though lacking the lunatic humour of multi-jointed contortionist Captain Frodo, who does a similar stunt with a tennis racket in the current London show La Soiree. It is the aerial antics that truly catch one’s breath. Circa do not just defy gravity, they howl in the face of it as they scale ropes, form human mountains or simply fly through the air to the accompaniment of Radiohead and Leonard Cohen.

And so I had to do some flying too, but with the assistance of Easyjet. A weekend was only long enough to get a taste of the varied pleasures of the Belfast Festival, but it was an impressive taste. The problem is that my senses now feel overwhelmed. I think I need to lay prostrate on the floor myself for a while to take it all in.

• Belfast Festival website
• Black Watch is at the Barbican from 27 November to 22 January, 2011, and then in Washington DC, University of North Carolina, Austin, Texas and Chicago