Substance, Style and Spirit.(European summer theater and arts offerings)

Slipping away almost as soon as we have it in our grasp, summer has always been conducive to dramas and dreams. Plays seem more enchanting under the sun in outdoor theaters. Long, hot days make idle contemplation almost obligatory, bringing out the urbane dilettante in us all. Concerts on balmy evenings linger in the memory as the leaves turn and nights grow colder. "The sun bared the reality of our lives," Ben Okri writes in "The Famished Road." From Shakespeare to Berlioz, what's showing on Europe's stages this summer has a decidedly reflective cast to it, a look back into history to help us either escape or understand the tumultuous events of the recent past.

With more people than ever vacationing locally, some of Europe's most exciting summer productions take place away from the usual tourist hubs this year. Music festivals in particular tend to draw local--and loyal- - fans. One little-known gem: Hungary's Sziget Festival, on the Obuda Sziget, an island in the Danube River near Budapest, attracts a young, energetic crowd with world music, techno, jazz and classical concerts on 50 stages. In Tabor, south of Prague, one of the capital's most popular clubs is staging Go Planet Roxy, an open-air rock festival June 20 and 21, boasting headline acts like Morcheeba, Marilyn Manson and Moloko. July is for jazz, as fans flock to Perugia, where the Umbrian Jazz Festival --will celebrate its 30th anniversary with Diana Krall, Tony Bennett, Van Morrison and James Brown.

The London stage is forgoing froth for substance this season. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre plays off current events with a series of dramas (through Sept. 28) that focus on kingship and regime change. Last week it premiered a lively new production of "Richard III," whose own "glorious summer" spirals into ignominious defeat and death. In the National Theatre's production of "Henry V," until Aug. 20, England's ruler contemplates a risky foreign war. Even the traditionally lighthearted Proms--a summerlong series of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall--have taken Greek myths as this year's theme. The epic story of the savage destruction of Troy connects Michael Tippett's opera about Troy's "King Priam" with Berlioz's "The Trojans," on Aug. 25, and Purcell's gorgeous "Dido and Aeneas" on Sept. 2.

Ancient dramas are also at the heart of Greece's summer entertainment. The Epidaurus Festival, on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, offers plays by Euripides and Aristophanes in an open-air theater dating from the fourth century B.C. The Greek National Ballet will perform Ludwig Minkus's lyrical "Don Quixote" July 17 and 18. Sophocles' "Oedipus" trilogy, on Sept. 10 and 11, is an English-language version by the ...