This is a production which makes the National look secure. Josie Rourke’s sumptuous and thoughtful staging of Dancing at Lughnasa shows why this 1990 play is so loved. It is not an evening that will jolt an audience into looking at the future, perhaps not even at the present; it is likely, though, to make people consider what they have made of their pasts.
Brian Friel’s drama – written after Faith Healer and Translations and before his version of Uncle Vanya – is in more than one way a memory play. Set in 1936, in County Donegal, it is dedicated to Friel’s mother and four of her sisters: single! childless! (I’m hoping those attributes now appear less bizarre and less defining). It shows maturing women, scraping their livings as schoolteacher and craftswoman – one sister is described simply as “knitter”. Their activities, emotional lives and horizons are on the brink of change, disrupted by industrialisation, and by the arrival of one on/off lover (an over-skittish Tom Riley) and one priest-brother home from Africa in obscure circumstances (Ardal O’Hanlon is exactly right in his mingle of visionary kindness and muddle). The action is framed, Tennessee Williams-style, by a male narrator, the son of one of the women; a potentially drama-draining device that Tom Vaughan-Lawlor pulls off with casual control: the play becomes a piece of storytelling such as might have been heard on the Bakelite wireless which, crackling in and out of life, is the most modern object on view.
