THE three most remarkable new works unveiled at the Galway Arts Festival this month were the new Druid Theatre Company production The Revenant, the new Town Hall Theatre production of The Sunset Limited by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company from Chicago, and The Space Between, the new physical theater performance by Circa at the Black Box Theatre.

For decades now, the new Druid Theatre Company production at the Galway Arts Festival has been the cultural high water mark and the acknowledged grand finale of the highly anticipated annual event. They have rarely disappointed, but this year the company has staged an exceptional new play by Pat McCabe - author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto - unveiling one of the most accomplished new Irish works in years.

On the surface McCabe's new play is about what can happen to lonely misfits in rural Irish communities. Frank Brady, the title character previously introduced as a boy murderer in The Butcher Boy, now finds himself exiled to the outer darkness of rural Irish life; that terrible community imposed exile that is the fate of the odd.

But now he may be a ghost, or he may be so banished by his former community that he's the closest thing to one. Either way the play concerns itself with the theme of death in life, real and metaphoric, and the problem of evil (where it comes from, and how mysterious it often is).

McCabe's longstanding creative partnership with Irish rock musician Gavin Friday also gives the play an extra dimension. Friday's plaintive, haunting music is heard at critical moments in the play to powerful effect.

McCabe has never been afraid of exploring unsettling themes, and this play may be his darkest ever. Incest, molestation, murder and madness are addressed in a script that is surprisingly funny, tender, frightening and breathtakingly sad.

Actor Peter Trant gives a spirited performance, moving from absurdist humor to the most terrifying denouement of an Irish play seen in years.

McCabe knows how to create real psychological menace and for all its laughs along the way, this is a spine-tingler of a work. Audience members were divided by its merits and its approach, but McCabe and director Joe O'Byrne have created an enduring work of art.

Across town at the Town Hall Theatre, the famous American company Steppenwolf were presenting author Cormac McCarthy's (All The Pretty Horses) play The Sunset Limited.

Hailed by critics in the U.S. when it opened here earlier this year, this one act piece about faith and faithlessness in a world of ever diminishing goodness is as conventional - in its way - as a Bible sermon.

When two otherwise unlikely companions meet after one saves the other from a suicide attempt, a dialogue ensues between them about the truth, fiction and belief.

The problem is that, from the beginning, the work feels contrived and even at times condescending. Actors Austin Pendleton and Freeman Coffey, as the white intellectual atheist from New York and the black ex-con from the south who saves his life, do their best with this material but it seems anachronistic, very specifically American in its themes and treatment, and the two men are too implacably opposed and oppositional from the outset.

Surprisingly, the play features a character that comes perilously close to a "magic Negro," a stock character who appears often in fiction and film. The word Negro is used intentionally in this context to claim that the archetype can often be a (usually unintentional) racist throwback.

The magical Negro is typically "in some way outwardly or inwardly disabled, either by discrimination, disability or social constraint," often a janitor or prisoner. He has no extensively delineated past - he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist - and he is the black stereotype, "prone to criminality and laziness."

It's a familiar picture to generations of Irish people who saw themselves menaced and marked by similar stereotypes. So to counterbalance any offense, the character is often given some sort of spiritual or magical power.

He is patient and wise, often dispensing various words of wisdom, and is "closer to the earth." Watching the play, I was distracted by the alarm bells that occasionally rang in my head when the script reproduced these themes.

What a pleasure it was to witness Australia's Circa physical theater group develop and extend their range in The Space Between. Existing in an exciting no-man's-land between classical dance and circus acrobatics, the audience was astounded by their grace and athleticism.