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.
Nostalgia, you might think. Well, there is real warmth in the evocation, and a wistful tinge – 30s music including Anything Goes wafts from that wireless – but there is also harshness and strangeness. A grand illumination comes from Vaughan-Lawlor’s final speech. He lights up not only this play, but also the way much theatre works when he talks of his strongest memory, in which “atmosphere is more real than incident”. More happens (including very expressive laundry work) in Dancing at Lughnasa than in Waiting for Godot, but it is hardly event-packed: much is revealed by one sister watching another.
Robert Jones’s design immediately opens up heart and expectations, cleverly projecting both solidity and illusion. A well-worn kitchen with table and dresser is perched in front of an expansive, undulating landscape: dark mountains, a massive tree, a winding path as in a Bible story. All set aglow and fading by Mark Henderson’s radiant lighting, igniting the imagination but too golden to be completely true. There is nothing candied about the sisters’ performances: hard to beat Louisa Harland’s quiet unravelling or Justine Mitchell’s complicated shrivelling. Siobhán McSweeney from Derry Girls is riotously engaging as the self-styled comic and champion smoker, yet also a wistful dreamer: when she opens her hands to reveal a secret, there is nothing there.
Dancing, choreographed by Wayne McGregor, does take a febrile, joyful form – it is a pagan explosion, which has more in common with the priest’s African life than the pope would like to think. Yet it is also envisaged as something internal, a shift of thought and emotion which leaves the sisters rapt, swaying gently apart from each other yet moved by the same rhythm, like grass in the wind.
Private Lives, set not long before Friel’s play, seemed sure-fire for the Donmar. Yet though Michael Longhurst’s production has sparks and intelligence, it misses the penetration of Coward’s wit: it is too deliberate. This is the play in which a formerly married couple, “jagged with sophistication”, meet again while honeymooning with less nimble wits (“you couldn’t be flippant if you tried”) and run off together. They then bash each other up, are pursued by the new spouses, and escape together again. No point in pretending that the play has much interest in the other spice; they have to be dazzling to attract any attention and they aren’t here – Laura Carmichael is accurately simpering; Sargon Yelda is little more than a mannequin.
Unexpectedly, the trouble starts with the design by the mighty Hildegard Bechtler. A gilded terrace – spindly as if made to hold a cocktail glass – overlooks a tousle of tumbled material: waves splashing over concealed rocks? an abandoned past? buried secrets? The set ingeniously makes an audience put the questions – but you have to work at it, which goes against the grain of a drama in which everything, however toxic, should slip down. Its grace, though not quite a saving one, is that is allows a spectacular moment when, for the (generally stronger) second half, the material is whipped away to reveal the furniture of a Paris flat – the past and its hidden perils resurfacing.
Then there is Stephen Mangan, an actor of real ease but here I think misdirected, who begins over-determined to reverse expectations, playing the svelte and lethal Elyot as if he were a thug disguising his inner drawl. He is much stronger – and more elegant – in the second half, but he has lost the capacity to surprise.
Two things are spot on. First is Rachael Stirling, an actor who is growing all the time in silky subtlety. She seems to have rearranged her joints – with a tilt of her head and candelabra arms she could be a model for an art nouveau ornament. Wrist crooked, and fingers slightly splayed, she looks if she is holding a cigarette even when she isn’t. And then there is the cigarette work: there is so much of it between Amanda and Elyot that you begin to expect a credit in the programme. It is a marvellous interchange: the passing of what Coward would certainly not have called fags, the lighting up, the flirtatious or vicious withholding of the heavy silver lighter. The moment when Mangan unrolls himself at the piano and nonchalantly picks out Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Strange though that the most convincing moments in a Coward play should be silent.
Star ratings (out of five):
Dancing at Lughnasa ★★★★
Private Lives ★★★
