Dancing at Lughnasa: Play for study

Dancing at Lughnasa is one of the most acclaimed plays of the latter half of the twentieth century. Its author Brian Friel (1929-2015) was already known for the plays Faith Healer (1979), Aristocrats (1979) and Translations (1980), but it was Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) that brought him international recognition. A film version, starring Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon, was made in 1998.

The critic Michael Billington, reviewing the play at the National Theatre in 1990, following its transfer from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, suggested that Friel had become ‘the Irish Chekhov, wresting poetry from everyday life.’

The narrator, Michael, takes us back to 1936 when he was a seven-year-old child being brought up by his unmarried mother, Chris, and her four Catholic sisters in genteel poverty in the family home in Ballybeg, County Donegal. The Mundy sisters, all single, are trapped and stifled by their economic circumstances. The wider world only impinges on their lives when outsiders enter it. These are their frail older brother Jack, returning from 25 years as a missionary in an African leper colony, where he was accustomed to certain pagan rituals, and Michael's father, Gerry, a dashing dreamer, passing through on his way to fight the fascists in Spain.