Dancing at Lughnasa

Dancing at Lughnasa. Image Ros Kavanagh

****

Memory plays can be problem plays. Brian Friel’s 1990 classic, Dancing at Lughnasa, a case in point. Flaunting with the conventions of realism, its narrator more distanced author than invested character, using memory to legitimise its saccharine sentimentality, it should come with its own insulin shot. Issues director Caroline Byrne tackles head on, ultimately winning the war even while losing key battles. Friel’s memory tale of five Mundy sisters in fictional Ballybeg in 1936 awash in Paul Keogan’s sepia soaked light. A school teacher, an unmarried mother, a clothes maker, a house keeper and what was once called a simpleton; together they dream of boys, dancing, and the harvest festival. Their daily lives a struggle to make ends meet as they raise the illegitimate child Michael. The return of the exhausted Father Jack who served in the missionaries in Uganda, and a visit from Michael’s father bring subtle yet distinct challenges. But sure wasn’t it long ago and far away, as Michael constantly reminds us. Fact conflated with atmosphere. History or nostalgia a distinction without a difference. Even if life proves a hardship that doesn’t play out well. Still, thanks for the memories. We’ll always have Ballybeg. Here’s looking at you kid. Or rather, here’s the kid looking at you.

Lauren Farrell, Zara Devlin, Ruth McGill in Dancing at Lughnasa. Image Ros Kavanagh

If Byrne resolves key tensions, some decisions prove less successful. A treacle coloured mix of realism and meta-theatricality sees Chiara Stephenson’s wooden frame punching out past the proscenium and towards the audience. Evoking less the memory of an Irish cottage so much as a Balinese bamboo hut. An unwelcome pole, front at centre, making for an annoying visual distraction. A thin sheet of gauze with a cut out door further promotes meta-theatrical self awareness, looking lazily done. Like its cast when talking to thin air as an invisible Michael looks on. In contrast, the field with its rich harvest against which coming and goings are superbly silhouetted, or set as tableaux, is a masterstroke. Stephenson's costumes also hugely successful for being painstakingly detailed. Aside from the neutral Michael who doesn’t seem to know if he belongs in the 1930s, the 1960s or sometime later. Terence Keeley’s Michael, a Jackanory story teller recounting events he couldn’t possible have seen, being someone its hard to connect with. Like a news anchor relaying the past, Michael is more device than character. Those populating his childhood memories the ones we really care about.

Molly Logan, Zara Devlin, Jack Meade, Nicky Harley in Dancing at Lughnasa. Image Ros Kavanagh

Yet others struggle for connection or credibility. Lauren Farrell’s Rose, despite being an exuberance of impassioned energies, is hard to view as someone in need of continuous care. Ruth McGill’s schoolmarmish Kate, all severity with touches of softness, too often strikes a one tone note of eternal reprimand. Less struggling elder trying to hold her family together so much as their walking admonishment. Leaving it to Molly Logan’s loud mouth Maggie, and Nicky Harley’s lonesome Agnes to provide nuance and depth, which both do splendidly. Along with much of the humour. The relationship between Zara Devlin’s Christina and Jack Meade’s Gerry leaving others to bring up the comic rear. Meade’s understated Gerry a cowardly sneak making half baked plans. Devlin’s Chris seeing through him, if not seeing everything, yet loving him all the same. Devlin making us understand why through touching glances and gentle shifts as she draws shyly, yet confidently closer. Devlin’s radiating presence irresistible even when standing still, informing a top drawer performance. One that risks being eclipsed by Peter Gowen’s confused Father Jack. A mesmerising portrayal of a man of inherent contradictions embodying the central tensions of the play. Jack, losing his memory or reclaiming it, being a Christian pagan in search of new blood rituals and a polyamorous church.

Molly Logan, Nicky Harley, Peter Gowen, Zara Devlin in Dancing at Lughnasa. Image Ros Kavanagh

This tension between the civilised and the savage, the old ways and the new, is given vivid expression in Father Jack’s tale of animal sacrifices in Africa. In the temperamental Marconi bringing music from the secular world into the Mundy’s Catholic kitchen. Sinéad Diskin’s sound design, awash with musical nostalgia, evoking temptations for Bacchanalian abandonment in 1936. Irish traditional music facilitating a tribal, ritualised release as the women, like a Wiccan coven, dance wildly in circles around the kitchen table, covering their faces in masks of white dust. Their bodies whirling dervishes of irrepressible release as sepia turns to flame. A bonfire celebrating the true fruits of the harvest ceremony. Even though it is unable to halt the relentless march of progress. Which will see some condemned to factories, others to the cruel streets of London. The Mundy's, like the Tuatha Dé Danann, condemned to an underworld of memory lost to the mists of time. To memory’s flights of fancy. Its faults and inevitable failure when there is no one left to remember.

Dancing at Lughnasa. Image Ros Kavanagh

Returning to The Gate after twenty years, Byrne ensures Dancing at Lughnasa walks its delicate tightrope with considerable style. Like Micheal, it might all be in our mind, but Byrne aspires to more. Never tipping into overt sentimentality, she’s wise enough to know you can’t erase it. Nor does she allow the script become a dried, dusty historical document whose facts get in the way of its fictions. Rather, Dancing at Lughnasa arrives at where memory becomes myth. Connecting us to things we don’t want to forget because they enrich and re-connect us. A pretty impressive feat, and a great night of theatre.

Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel, runs at The Gate Theatre until September 21.

For more infmratine visit The Gate Theatre