Welcome

Welcome to The Rep’s insight for Dancing At Lughnasa by Brian Friel.

Dancing At Lughnasa is a memory play told from the point of view of Michael Evans, the narrator, who recounts the summer of 1936 when he was seven years old. He lives with the five Mundy sisters (Kate, Maggie, Agnes, Rosie, and Christina), all unmarried, in a big cottage outside the town of Ballybeg in Donegal.Struggling to make a living, these courageous, good-hearted women work to keep hope alive by finding strength in each other and through brief escapes in dancing to the music on their new wireless radio.

The oldest, Kate, a schoolteacher, is the only one with a well paid job. Agnes and Rose knit gloves to sell in town, to earn a little money for the household. They also help Maggie keep the house. Maggie and Christina (Michael’s Mother) have no income at all. Recently returned is their brother Jack, a priest who has lived as a missionary in a leper colony in Uganda for 25 years. He suffers from malaria and has trouble remembering many things, including the sisters’ names and his English vocabulary. Gerry, Michael’s father, is charming and unreliable. A clown and a vagabond, he visits rarely and always arrives unannounced. Unbeknowst to the Mundy’s he has another family in Wales. but this does not prevent him from proposing to Christina. He has returned this time to tell her he is joining the International Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

Living during a time of oppressive Catholic beliefs, the women have all experienced serious disappointment. They live repressed lives, in which neither their emotions or sexuality are expressed openly. The sisters struggle with economic hardship and their conventional religious values as they face the challenges of their day. The play is set at harvest time in August 1936, during the feast of Lugh, the pagan god of the sun worshiped by the Celtics. The sisters discuss dancing in the pagan festival, even though rumours are rife about its strange rites in which a local boy is terribly burnt. The sisters’ newly purchased radio supplies them with dance music of the 1930’s, which also has been condemed by the Catholic church. The music inspires them to dance like the pagans an “un-Christian” activity upon which Kate frowns. The music from the radio transforms the sisters from “spiritually correct” Catholic women to shrieking, stomping wild women in their own kitchen – not unlike the primitive rituals observed by their brother Jack in Uganda. They ask Jack to introducethem to men, but he is struggling with his own adjustments to their civilization and in ill health to Ballybeg because he can no longer remain in Uganda. Michael, at age seven, unexpectedly meets his father, Gerry, for the first time. Gerry, a ne’erdo-well Welsh salesman, sweeps Chris away in an elgant dance across the fields, but fails to make any lasting commitment to her or to Michael. With the inroduction of each new character, change is underway, and each change may compromise the siters’ conventional values and family stability.

The play is largely naturalistic in style and written in two acts. The action takes place over a period of three weeks. Michael, who is Christina’s son, narrates the action.

All of the Dancing At Lughnasa resources on these pages have been sourced and written by Nicky Robey.