The Books: “Dancing at Lughnasa” (Brian Friel)

Next in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next play on the script shelf:

Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. This is Brian Friel’s most commercially successful play to date, seeing as it was made into a movie and all. I like it better as a stage play myself, although the performances are good in the film. When the sisters start dancing in the film … it’s almost like they’re suddenly in an out-take of Riverdance: the Movie. It’s too contrived, it’s too much like a real dance routine … But in a good production (I’ve only seen it once, but it was a terrific production) – it’s one of the most moving spontaneous expressions of joy and the human spirit that a playwright has ever created. It’s almost like Chekhov: For just a couple of moments, these people forget their troubles, and transcend. As human beings are all meant to transcend. Man is inherently a spiritual being, man is meant to be happy. But we all know how THAT theory usually works out, don’t we? And so the dancing at Lughnasa is not a life-changing moment, or anything that really makes any difference. There are no miracles here. But for us, in the audience, it is a moment of exhilaration, excitement – and also sadness because it has to end. The dancing scene gave me feckin’ goose-bumps when I saw it. These kind of grim sober Irish ladies suddenly taking off the leash – whipping off the leash – and dancing like pagan goddesses. Sisters. Holding hands, stamping, jumping, circling, throwing back their heads and laughing … Oh God. Got a lump in my throat right now just remembering!

I’ll post the beginning of the play:

EXCERPT FROM Dancing at Lughnasa:

When the play opens MICHAEL is standing downstage left in a pool of light. The rest of the stage is in darkness. Immediately MICHAEL begins speaking, slowing bring up the lights on the rest of the stage.

Around the stage and at a distance from MICHAEL the other characters stand motionless in formal tableau. MAGGIE is at the kitchen window. CHRIS is at the front door. KATE at extreme stage right. ROSE and GERRY sit on the garden seat. JACK stands beside ROSE. AGNES is upstage left. They hold these positions while MICHAEL talks to the audience.

MICHAEL . When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936 different kinds of memories offer themselves to me. We got our first wireless set that summer — well, a sort of a set; and it obsessed us. And because it arrived as August was about to begin, my Aunt Maggie — she was the joker of the family — she suggested we give it a name. She wanted to call it Lugh after the old Celtic God of the Harvest. Because in the old days August the First was La Lughnasa, the feast day of the pagan god, Lugh; and the days and week sof harvesting that followed were called the Festival of Lughnasa. But Aunt Kate — she was a national schoolteacher and a very proper woman — she said it would be sinful to christen an inanimate object with any kind of name, not to talk of a pagan god. So we just called it Marconi because that was the name emblazoned on the set.

And about three weeks before we got that wireless, my mother’s brother, my Uncle Jack, came home from Africa for the first time ever. For twenty-five years he had worked in a leper colony there, in a remote village called Ryanga in Uganda. The only time he ever left that village was for about six months during World War One when he was chaplain to the British Army in East Africa. Then back to that grim hospice where he worked without a break for a further eighteen years. And now in his early fifties and in bad health he had come home to Ballybeg — as it turned out — to die.

And when I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936, these two memories — of our first wireless and of Father Jack’s return — are always linked. So that when I recall my first shock at Jack’s appearance, shrunken and jaundiced with malaria, at the same time I remember my first delight, indeed my awe, at the sheer magic of that radio. And when I remember the kitchen throbbing with the beat of the Irish dance music beamed to us all the way from Dublin, and my mother and her sisters suddenly catching hands and dancing a spontaneous step-dance and laughing — screaming! — like excited schoolgirls, at the same time I see that forlorn figure of Father Jack’s shuffling from room to room as if he were searching for something but couldn’t remember what. And even though I was only a child of seven at the time I know I had a sense of unease, some awareness of a widening breach between what seemed to be and what was, of things changing too quickly before my eyes, of becoming what they ought not to be. That may have been because Uncle Jack hadn’t turned out at all like the resplendent figure in my head. Or maybe because I had witnessed Marconi’s voodoo derange those kind, sensible women and transform them into shrieking strangers. Or maybe it was because during those Lughnasa weeks of 1936 we were visited on two occasions by my father, Gerry Evans, and for the first time in my life I had a chance to observe him.