Friel’s tribute to the potency of theatre and the power of dance
Michael’s wistful monologue in Dancing at Lughnasa (1990)
Brian Friel was in his early 60s when, in 1990, he wrote his most successful play, Dancing at Lughnasa – a hit at the Abbey, Dublin, then the National, then on Broadway, thereafter. In 1998 it became a film starring Meryl Streep. By this point in his career, with more than a dozen major works to his name, Friel was a towering figure in Englishlanguage theatre tout court, having made his name in 1964 with Philadelphia, Here I Come!.
An accomplished adapter of Chekhov, Friel was sometimes likened to the Russian master, drawn to worlds on the cusp of change, where gaiety and humour nestled side by side with melancholy and a piercing sense of the transience of human affairs. With Lughnasa (pronounced Loo-na-sa), the temptation to make the comparison is particularly inviting. Here is something not a million miles from Three Sisters: a portrait of five sisters, the Mundy family, the eldest of whom Kate (the Streep role) is a schoolteacher, prim, unmarried, careworn – much like the dissatisfied Olga is in Chekhov’s play.
And yet, setting the rural action in August 1936, when the author was seven, and presenting it from the dual perspective of a boy of the same age called Michael and his older adult self, Friel was clearly casting his mind back to his own formative and familial experiences. This “memory play” is dedicated to “those five brave Glenties women” – Glenties being the small County Donegal town where his mother was a post-mistress.
Friel had two maiden aunts who ended up destitute in London, having left the family home in Glenties, never to return. The fate of the two women is alluded to in the play: Agnes and the simple-minded Rose, who have scratched a living hand-knitting gloves, find themselves surplus to requirements after a factory opens, and so disappear, only tracked down (one deceased, the other in a hospice) many years later.
Set, as a lot of Friel’s plays are, in fictional Ballybeg, the action is, however, fixed in a fondly remembered time before this upheaval as the annual Irish harvest festival (named after the pagan god Lugh) looms and sensuous sounds fill the air, courtesy of a new Marconi radio.
Dancing at Lughnasa, which won the Olivier and Tony Best Plays awards, ushered in a golden decade of confidence for new Irish playwriting and reaffirmed one of its fortes: a warm lyricism of speech. But the evening’s most memorable, audacious stroke is the bout of wordless ecstasy that seizes the women in Act One as, one by one, they cast chores and Christian rectitude aside, and dance in their kitchen to a radio ceilidh band. The scene – possibly Friel’s finest – is recalled in the closing minutes in arguably his greatest speech, the older Michael contemplating that transcendent mood of physical euphoria.
The context
Act Two picks up a few weeks after Act One. As the radio plays
Anything Goes, Michael’s errant father flirts with one sister while his mother watches in sadness. Rose arrives holding a dead rooster, killed by a fox, and Jack, Michael’s tragicomical uncle, shows up in a soiled military uniform. A former missionary, Jack has come home – in mental disarray – from a Ugandan leper colony having “gone native” and grown to admire local (polygamous) ways. One minute, the talk is of bilberries, jokes are cracked; the next, the older Michael is telling us that in 12 months’ time Jack would be dead, Agnes and Rose gone, and “the heart seemed to go out of the house”.
What’s in the speech?
Casting his mind back to that summer of 1936, Michael ponders the illusory nature of memory, where “atmosphere is more real than incident… the air is nostalgic with the music of the Thirties. It drifts in from somewhere far away – a mirage of sound…”
Friel has the cast sway “very slightly from side to side”, as he speaks, and Michael turns the distant past in his mind’s eye into a Chagallian picture of floating movement: “When I remember it, I think of it as dancing. Dancing with eyes half closed because to open them would break the spell. Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement – as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary…”
Why is it so powerful?
“The most you can hope for is that you will hold [the audience’s] intelligent interest right up to the final curtain,” Friel once said modestly. Here, at the “final curtain”, we’re left gasping – everything comes together as he posits the ineffable nature of experience in a few sentences, at once celebrating the power of words and acknowledging their limitation. We’re invited to remember that highlight of Act One, a moment of physical revelry, but it has already passed into another realm, reachable only by the unreliable mind. The past is another country: in the blink of an eye living characters become ghostlike, and what Michael is describing isn’t just his experience but existence itself. It’s as if Friel is angling the apparatus of theatre to catch passing celestial light, dazzling us with his wistful magic.
In performance
The moment has stayed with me since I saw it at the National in 1990, with Gerard Mcsorley as Michael, the cast including (dear-hearted, sadly departed) Anita Reeves, Brid Brennan, Alec Mccowen and Stephen Dillane, with Rosaleen Linehan as Kate. It was revived, with spellbinding potency, at the Old Vic in 2009 (a production that saw the pop-star Andrea Corr make her stage debut). Currently for a pittance on Amazon Prime Video (99p), you can rent the film, with Michael Gambon magnificently haunted as Jack and the five sisters seen from on high at the end, linking arms in a slow-motion circle of carefree, spirited abandon.
Why it matters now
It’s such a self-contained tribute to the power of theatre and the potency of dance, such a kindly summation of bygone ways and enduring Irish temperaments that, with our playhouses dark, it’s impossible not to bask in the memory of Dancing at
Lughnasa as you might comfort yourself in winter thinking of summer. Besides which, 30 years on, doesn’t this soft-focus drama showing a domestic haven on the brink of violent change now seem horribly close to home?