BSW3 27. Dancing at Lughnasa

Speaker: Catherine ByrneOur audio piece remembers that famous night of the 11th August 1991 when a great play came home.This is the actual house where Brian Friel's aunts, the McLoone sisters, the 'five brave Glenties women' of the play, Dancing at Lughnasa, actually lived together in the 1930s. Just off Station Road outside the harvest fair town of Glenties, this is the site that inspired a modern masterpiece by a playwright at the height of his powers. The Public Theatre and Professor Martin Andrucki summed up its power in their critique of the play's denouement: -  'In the last lines of the play, the narrator Michael tells us that when he remembers that summer of 1936 everybody seems to be "[d]ancing, as if language had surrendered to movement...as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way...to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in...those...movements. Dancing as if words were no longer necessary." Each of the characters in the play dances at some crucial moment: Gerry and Chris when they meet after a long separation, Father Jack when he celebrates the power of the Goddess, all the sisters when the sounds of the wireless bring them into contact with the outside world.  What Michael suggests is that people dance at such moments because dancing provides a way to transcend the painful contradictions, conflicts, and uncertainties of ordinary experience. Dancing takes us beyond the everyday world of language and its ambiguities to a place where our hopes can be painlessly, though fleetingly, fulfilled. If the kites imply the conflicting emotions associated with change, both exhilaration and terror, dancing promises a deliverance from such inner conflict, allowing an experience of undivided happiness'.  Yes, it's that good and thankfully Friel has been recently honoured as Donegal Person of the Year by the Donegal Association in Dublin. The play is a remarkable tribute to the Mundy sisters' spirit and from this meagre setting did such a magical story evolve. Try and see the play being performed with a good cast as the Mundy sisters. Meryl Streep can do many things (including outdrinking most people the night she opened this house with Friel some years ago no less), but the film is not a patch on the tour de force that is the play.  For the MacGill summer school of 1991 honouring Friel for the second time, the Abbey theatre famously came up for one night only and performed the play in the Comprehensive school you'll have passed by. Friel in introducing the play that night said he was nervous as a kitten being so close to the action from the 1930s. He needn't have worried as the performance was mesmerising and got a standing ovation.  Taken from The Bluestack Way Guide, a soundscape along the 51km waymarked way from Donegal Town along the hills to Glenties and on to Ardara.