Affection and regret suffuse Brian Friel’s award-winning 1990 memory play, where the lives of five unmarried sisters in rural County Donegal represent the changing world of 1936. It’s given a lovingly detailed revival here at the National – where the original production transferred from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre – by director Josie Rourke, with a splendid ensemble cast including Justine Mitchell, Derry Girls’ Siobhán McSweeney and compelling newcomer Alison Oliver.
True, 30-plus years on, the script’s juxtaposition of pagan liberation and austere repression in Ireland and the wider world feels slightly overdone. Though Robert Jones’s costumes are terrific, his prettified set unhelpfully recalls The Wizard of Oz. But otherwise, this remains a powerfully moving evocation of time, place and atmosphere.
Partly autobiographical, it’s presented as the adult recollection of Michael, son of the youngest of the Mundy sisters, Chris (Oliver), and her charming but feckless and mostly absent Welsh lover, Gerry. Aged seven when the story unfolds, and played at a disarming tangent from the main action by grown-up Tom Vaughan-Lawler, Michael is doted on by Chris and teased by exuberant aunt Maggie (McSweeney).
Family life for the Mundys is tight-knit, occasionally abrasive, and precarious. The peat-heated cottage is held together by the nagging organisational instinct, and the income, of schoolmarm eldest sister Kate (Mitchell), with a little extra from the gloves knitted by Agnes, a seriously underwritten character, and Rose, who has a learning disability. The family’s giant radio, a symbol of the future, keeps conking out.
Shame stalks the family as well as poverty. Along with Michael, born “out of wedlock”, the sisters are caring for their missionary brother Jack (Father Ted’s Ardal O’Hanlon, unrecognisable in a good way), who contracted malaria and “went native” in Uganda. Though O’Hanlon sells them well, Jack’s enthusiastic speeches about sacrifices and dancing lepers sound clumsy today. Ditto the decision of Tom Riley’s irresistibly daft Gerry to join the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War.
Mostly the play works brilliantly across many levels. The sisters begin with some hopes, but are thwarted by religion, misogyny, history and the march of progress. The joyful abandon they bring to step-dances during the pagan harvest festival of Lughnasa will be swept away, like so much else after 1936.
Even if you missed all the subtext, this show would still delight in its acute depiction of family dynamics. The careworn exasperation of Mitchell’s Kate, knowing she has to be unpopular to keep things together; McSweeney’s bluff, fag-puffing Maggie defusing tensions; the way Oliver’s expressive Chris lights up when Gerry appears, to the mixed envy and despair of her siblings.
Rourke deserves plaudits, but I’m sure she’d defer the praise. This play won Friel the Evening Standard Award for best play in 1991, and it still looks richly deserved.
National Theatre, to May 27; nationaltheatre.org.uk
