Dancing at Lughnasa

Synopsis

An award winning and moving Irish drama set in the closing days of the long hot summer of 1936. A tender portrait of a family of five strong, single women whose lives are revitalised by the breathtaking music and dancing of their Donegal home. 1990 Laurence Olivier Award and Broadway Award for Best New Play. (Lughnasa is pronounced Loo-na-sa)

Our Review:

6 March 2009

Brian Friel has turned eighty this year and he was at the Old Vic on opening night to see this glorious revival by Anna Mackmin of what is certainly one of his very best plays, if not his masterpiece.

The second show in a few days to be set in 1936 – Burnt by the Sun is another kind of idyll, threatened by Stalin’s reign of terror; the Irish community here is feeling the effects at last of the Industrial Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War is a remote reality – Dancing at Lughnasa is a poignant memory play about five sisters in Friel’s perennial fictional Donegal village of Ballybeg.

One of the sisters was the unmarried mother of Peter McDonald’s grown-up Michael, who remembers this summer at the harvest festival time of the pagan god Lugh when he was seven years old. Uncle Jack (growly, slightly discombobulated Finbar Lynch), is a priest who has returned from hi...

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Latest User Review

rds - 6 May 2009:

David Baxter sums it up well here. The narrator certainly spent most of his time swiveling around so that the audience could catch at least some of what he was saying, but his fellow actors this wasn't an option and so many in the audience would have struggled to catch what was being said and particular with the heavy accents employed. Apart from that fundamental flaw with the staging they are an exceptional cast. The women in particular are terrific, but one surprise for me was Jo Stone-Fewing's Welsh philanderer Gerry - he really is adorable. I suspect, seeing Sonia Friedman's name on the credits, its destined for an NYC transfer - it would, of course, fit perfectly the venue currently occupied by the Norman Conquests. As for here, its definitely worth seeing, but try and get close to the stage....

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