By Patrick Jackson BBC News Online

France's premier cultural festival, in Avignon, has been cancelled because of a strike by arts workers.

This will be a great loss. The importance of Avignon is much more than a French theatre festival - it is a unique playground in every sense for world theatre.

Theatre from every continent seems to put in an appearance

Having attended the 2002 festival, my heart goes out to both the theatre-goers and the performers who have lost the venue of venues this July.

Over a few short days in the baking heat of last summer, I had the privilege of seeing some of Europe's most innovative companies at work in the city's impressive churches and medieaval monuments.

And the way to the big productions was always dotted with street theatre and buskers from as far afield as Japan and India, whilst fringe troupes in full costume wooed the crowds with flyers, as if the posters which plastered every hoarding and railing were not advert enough.

Avignon and its old sister town, Villeneuve lez Avignon, sometimes have the feel of museums about them - vast monuments to medieaval wealth and pomp, crammed with churches and overlooked by fearsome fortresses.

But if the city has been crying out for spectacle since the Popes left town in the 15th Century, this annual festival has certainly been filling the gap for a few weeks of the summer at least.

Centaurs and sputniks

One of the highlights for me at Avignon 2002 was a Macbeth staged wholly on horseback by Luxembourg's Centaur Theatre in a field below Villeneuve.

Costumed actors mingle with the crowds to promote their plays

The drama of having real horses thundering around the ring of the marquee tent venue in semi-darkness is obvious, but less so the transformation of actors into virtual centaurs, acting out the great tragedy with subtlety, their steeds following every gesture.

There was a real, seaside donkey, of course, to carry the play's comical drunken porter.

Back in the city, in the peace and cool of a church, Russian director and virtual one-man-theatre Yevgeny Grishkovets staged his drama on loneliness in the city, Planet, with such delicate props as a tiny sputnik.

Star turn

From Italy, Pippo Delbono's Company took over a school on the outskirts of town to put on a bizarre but haunting cabaret which packed in the punters.

Avignon's many squares are a magnet for theatres

The performers included people plucked off the street or out of psychiatric hospitals by their larger-than-life director.

The actual "production" appeared to have no meaning other than to allow its cast a chance to do whatever they were good at in front of an audience - from retro disco-dancing to guitar-playing.

Indeed, anyone with a bit of a costume and a few props appeared welcome to put on a show of their own at this all-embracing festival, as I witnessed again and again, with performance spaces emerging out of nowhere among the festival crowds.