Re-evaluation is the keynote of the Dublin Theatre Festival as far as its artistic director Willie White is concerned. It’s nothing as grand as a formal theme, simply the kind of potential that such a festival offers, whether looking again at individual works such as A View From The Bridge or Oedipus or reconsidering what theatre as a whole can be and do. My own three-day visit over the Festival’s first weekend was too early for some of its flagship events, but still ran the gamut from classic revivals through deconstruction of existing works out to the edges of left field.

Joe Dowling has a deal of experience directing the work of Arthur Miller, and he does a solid job with A View From The Bridge at the Gate. However, other than a fairly sprightly pace, this revival of the tale of Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone’s jealousy and pride has nothing new to offer. Chicagoan Scott Aiello brings a fluidity and ease to the role of Eddie, establishing both his initial decency and the seeds from which mania will develop. However, any change in my perspective on the play was in favour of productions which do not cleave so strongly to the usual template of naturalism and specificity, such as Ivo van Hove´s London revival last year, whose radical reconfiguration I did not fully appreciate at the time. Here, one look at Beowulf Boritt's set design of timber wharves, with the Brooklyn Bridge arcing away on the backdrop, tells you exactly what the next two and a quarter hours are going to deliver.

Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive at the Gaiety also evoked comparisons with the play’s London production of 2013, though since the playwright directed both that unveiling and this home-town première there is little radical difference. The story of a trio of Dublin no-hopers feels more at ease on its own turf; the laughs of the early scenes come more freely, which in turn heightens the contrast with later, grimmer events. Adrian Dunbar almost breezes as small-scale wheeler-dealer Tommy, until he and Laurence Kinlan’s simpler, even cheerier Doc come up against it. The territory of the play feels more like that of McPherson’s early monologues such as Rum And Vodka, now expanded into the full dramatic territory into which he graduated this century.

White has been candid about two respects in which the Festival has had to trim its sails. The opening of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in 2010 has given Dublin a dedicated large-scale theatre venue, but in so doing has also offered international visitors a more tempting (and year-round) alternative to the Festival. The biggest visitors under the DTF banner this year are from the UK: the National Theatre’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time and a revival of Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa from the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, which also co-produced The Night Alive.

Both this dimension and the inevitable budgetary constraints have also limited international involvement, although this year does boast a handful of visiting companies from western Europe. This perhaps suggests that the “re-evaluation” argument is making a virtue of necessity, with Irish stalwarts such as Rough Magic, Pan Pan and (in nearby Dun Laoghaire) Fishamble staging work which may or may not diverge from their usual fare. The only one of these productions I was able to see was Pan Pan’s Newcastlewest at Smock Alley, which falls squarely within that company’s primary constituency of pushing at the edges of conventional notions of theatre. Dick Walsh’s story of 30-year-old Marya, her curmudgeon of a father and the arrival of a sudden job prospect is presented through deadpan absurdist scenes of banality – “a lot of drag”, as Walsh puts it – with Annabell Rickerby’s Marya sometimes accompanying herself on a phone app for little songlets. The four characters are augmented by a couple of supernumeraries who sometimes physically pose the actors (this at first seems related to Marya’s leg brace, but isn’t) or simply throw shapes. There is much artificiality of manner and transparent sexual power-play, which heightens both the trivial, mundane nature of the characters’ lives and their (especially Marya’s) attempts to transcend this. As spectators we never quite achieve transcendence ourselves, but we do gain some sense of our common failure.

Also post-dramatic, and much more musical, but far less interesting, is THISISPOPBABY’s I’m Your Man at the Project Arts Centre. Mark Palmer and Philip McMahon set out to create a work about redemption and about naked emotion – “affective resonance”, as Palmer’s programme note has it. What they have created is a song cycle performed and played by six actors/musicians which made me look back on my own maudlin teenage dirges with a comparative sense of pride. Neither material nor performance have a single original thing to say, and if this is meant to present a classical archetype of music about being a mess, then roll on Simon Cowell. Gavin Kostick’s At The Ford at the New Theatre presents a family business squabble with hefty injections of every folk mythos within reach, from Irish to Greek, and the almost mandatory incestuous tension. It works by and large, despite some overwriting and more than a little overacting by Rachel O’Byrne as the siren sister.

Most compelling by far, and also most fecund in terms of looking afresh at a subject, is Chekhov’s First Play by the young company Dead Centre in Trinity College’s Samuel Beckett Theatre. A Belgian company will present The Cherry Orchard towards the end of the Festival, but Dead Centre directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd and their cast have taken the early work Platonov, sort-of staged it but progressively subverted it. We all wear headphones which feed us a director’s commentary: “This play’s getting in the way of me explaining it,” he complains. Matters then  gradually disintegrate: the director seems (we only have the sound to go by, of course) to have shot himself, the title character eventually enters played by a supposed member of the audience, who remains mute whilst other characters act out their increasing disillusionment in ways which get to the heart of Chekhov without either looking or sounding remotely like him. Most Chekhov plays have a character named Masha; the star here, though, is Mash-Up.

Written for the Financial Times.