Dancing at Lughnasa
Gate Theatre, Dublin
★★★★★
None of Brian Friel’s many indestructible plays registered as an event in the way Dancing at Lughnasa managed in 1990. A fabled production opened at the Abbey before moving to London, where it won an Olivier award. Then came Broadway and, in 1998, a film starring Meryl Streep.
Caroline Byrne’s breathtakingly beautiful revival for the Gate confirms that event status still attends Lughnasa. Only a fool would seek to remodel such a memory play for “a new generation”, but, now playing to a vanishing few alive at the time of the story, the current production is more awake to antique strangeness than were previous incarnations.
The famous dance that breaks out when the Donegal sisters catch a blast of trad on the wireless — now choreographed with the assistance of Jean Butler — has the otherworldliness of a folk horror incantation. Chiara Stephenson’s eccentric set and Paul Keogan’s fluid lighting use shades of ochre to suggest both the qualified warmth of an Ulster summer and the African light recently abandoned by the sisters’ eccentric uncle. Waving crops at the rear, attained by an impossible doorway, offer a route into the past, the future and nowhere. Byrne and her team have made both dream and reverie of the play.
Dancing at Lughnasa, nonetheless, remains a rude text fashioned from the knotty vernacular of the northwest. Terence Keeley as Michael, the imagined author narrating from a more prosaic future, takes us back to 1936 and a house of five agreeably disputatious women. Playing Kate, the nominal head of the household, Ruth McGill has something of Katharine Hepburn about her: rigidity just about containing a half-glimpsed yearning. Zara Devlin, among our era’s best young actors, makes a hopeful sprite of Michael’s single mother. The boy is “love child” to a charming, but unreliable, Welsh father — an arrangement about which the sisters seem impressively relaxed. Lauren Farrell is childlike as Rose. Nicky Harley is steady as Agnes. Molly Logan is life-and-soul as Maggie. Peter Gowen is impish as the returning missionary uncle who (no other unreconstructed cliche will do) appears to have gone native. Jack Meade is irresistible as Michael’s dad. All hover around a child who appears only as empty space.
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A closing speech posits that the “dance” in the title — as in Anthony Powell’s novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time — is, among other things, an analogy for the process of reassembling the faded and the lost. That dance carries on even in the calmest moments — with blocking as precise and geometrical as that in ballet. Keeley’s delicate performance suggests a man moving to the melody as cautiously as possible lest toes get crushed. The main body of the piece is, nonetheless, alive with much bustle and clatter and (these are poor times) qualified pleasure. As is the case with so many Chekhov plays, Lughnasa is almost a comedy, but one aware that even the sharpest happiness must come to a melancholy end.
Carried off with integrity and invention, this triumphant revival deserves groaning houses from now until the leaves turn.
Runs at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, September 21st
