DANCING AT LUGHNASA

★★★★ National Theatre until May 27 nationaltheatre.org.uk

A white path winds down through wheat fields, past carts and vegetable patches to a flagstoned kitchen. There are no walls, this is an idealised boyhood memory, a snapshot in time, both intensely vivid and ephemeral like a halfforgotten song.

Bathed in sunshine, backed by enormous projections of trees and clouds scudding across blue skies, Josie Rourke’s production of Brian Friel’s semi-autobiographical play bewitched me and broke my heart.

It’s 1936 in rural Ireland, young Michael lives with his unmarried mother Chris, her four spinster sisters and disgraced missionary brother on their small farm. The boy is never seen. His adult self narrates, drifting among fragments of their last summer together.

Life is hard, burning turf for heat and sharing three eggs for dinner among eight. There are the natural tensions between five distinctly different adult women denied homes and hopes of their own by life and by circumstance.

But there is also love and kindness, laughter and unspoken understanding of the others’ private pains. Michael’s feckless wandering father slips in and out, endlessly making promises everyone knows he will never keep. Refreshingly, he is sympathetically rendered. Chris has made her peace with his nature, she allows him to charm her, to dance her up the hill, even though she sobs for months each time he leaves.

The sisters express what they cannot say through movement, from riotous group stomps around the kitchen to private moments of grace, yearning and joy. Michael’s narration reveals the gut-wrenching tragedies to come but, for that summer, they are bathed in gold, beautiful, dancing through life’s cruel indifference to modest dreams and quiet courage. In his memories, they are dancing there still.