DANCING AT LUGHNASA

Original titleDANCING AT LUGHNASA
CategoryPlay
AgegroupAdults
Cast8 total (5 F and 3 M)
Variable cast sizeNo
RepresentationNordic representation
Translator
TranslatorJon Borgersen
LanguagesSwedish, Danish, Nynorsk, Norwegian
This multi-award-winning play is about five impoverished spinster sisters in a remote part of County Donegal in 1936. With them lives Michael, seven-year old son of the youngest sister, and Jack, the sisters' elder brother, a missionary priest newly returned from Africa. The events of that summer are narrated in recall by the adult Michael, unfolding a tender study of these women's lives. The action of the play is told through the memory of the illegitimate son as he remembers the five women who raised him, his mother and four maiden aunts. He was only seven in 1936, the year his elderly uncle, a priest, returns after serving for 25 years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. For the young boy, two other disturbances occur that summer: the sisters acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen; and he meets his father for the first time, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields. From these small events spring the cracks that destroy the foundation of the family forever. But this haunting play is Friel's tribute to the spirit and valour of the past and its people.