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by Brian Friel, directed by Krista Jackson

Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

June 23-October 15, 2017

Michael: “Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement – as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak”

With its powerhouse cast Dancing at Lughnasa by the late Irish playwright Brian Friel (1929-2015) is sure to make a deep impression.  The production is filled with actors who have played leads in other plays, but, as is so often the case at the Shaw Festival, the same actors are also able to perform as a strong cohesive ensemble where no one actor dominates.  That approach is absolutely necessary for this play about the effects of changing times on a group of people, not only one individual.  While the production design is not ideal, the combined force of the acting handily triumphs over it.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a semi-autobiographical memory play from 1990 set in 1936 when the narrator Michael (Patrick Galligan) was seven years old, just as old as Friel would have been in that year.  The time is Lughnasa, a Gaelic festival marking the beginning of the harvest season on August 1.  The festival has pagan origins being dedicated to the god Lugh (pronounced “lu”), the god, not unlike the Greek Apollo, of the arts, crafts, law, the sun and the sky.  Lugh, like Apollo, was also associated with the summer harvest which in Ireland was celebrated with offerings of the first fruits of the harvest, bilberries, animal sacrifice and ritual dancing. 

Lughnasa and its pagan origins creep into every aspect of Friel’s play.  Michael tells us that when his five sisters splurged by buying a radio some sisters first thought of naming it Lugh, but the eldest sister Kate objected that it was wrong to use a pagan name in a Christian household.  And so they five settled on the name on the radio – Marconi.  Throughout the play Marconi seems to have a will of its own, turning on and off on its own and playing music that invariably calls up memories in the sisters or dance music that incites some of all of them to dance.  Marconi is like an oracle that channels divine energy wafting through the sky into the drab home of the down-at-heel Mundy sisters.

Then there is the sisters’ brother Jack (Peter Millard), a priest who has just returned home after working for 25 years at a leper colony in Uganda.  Physically he is suffering from malaria.  Mentally he is suffering from reverse culture shock.  He doesn’t feel at home in Ireland anymore.  His near-exclusive use of Swahili has caused him to lose his English vocabulary and he can’t even get his sisters’ names right.  More troubling is that he now identifies more with the customs and pagan religion of the people he served than he does with the Roman Catholicism he was meant to preach.  We infer that his superiors sent him back to Ireland because of this.  Yet, when the conversation shifts to discussion of habits and rituals, Jack brightens up and speaks with enthusiasm of what “we” do in Uganda, thus including himself as one of the natives.

The five unmarried Mundy sisters thus not only suffer from poverty but from at least two black marks on their reputation in the small community of Ballybeg, a fictional village where many of Friel’s plays are set.  One is the sisters’ tolerance of an illegitimate child in their house.  The other is that their brother, once the pride of the village, has come home in disgrace.  A third black mark is in the making with the mentally challenged Rosie carrying on an affair with a married man.

Friel’s interest in telling the story of the five Mundy sisters is not in surprising us. He has the now grown-up Michael tell us information about the futures of the five and of Jack and Gerry long before the show ends.  Friel uses Michael’s narration to cause us to view the action in a state of dramatic irony.  We already know what fate will meet the characters and thus can view details of the action as signs of what is to come.  From the adult Michael’s point of view a heavy fate hung over his family in 1936 of which they were thankfully generally unaware.  We watch as the the most reflective of the five sisters piece together what likely will happen to them all and sigh when we see the others enjoy whatever fleeting happiness they may have. 

As the narrator Michael, Patrick Galligan speaks with a voice filled with sadness and compassion for his mother, aunts and uncle in this last year they would all be together.  Galligan suggests that Michael is in no way judgemental in sharing his past with us.  Rather Galligan’s Michael tells us his story to demonstrate the strength of his family in coping with a difficult life and beyond that how a moment of divine ecstasy can visit even the most humble of people. 

Though the five women are all sisters, we see that they have taken on the roles of a “normal” family.  Kate takes on the role of a traditional father as the breadwinner and disciplinarian.  She is the voice of reason and of religious devotion.  Agnes, the most passive of the five, takes on the role of mother and comforter of the others.  Maggie takes on the role of a mouthy servant and cook for the other four, while Rose, because of her disability, and Christy, because of her age, are treated as the children of the family.  Christy’s son, invisible but voiced by the adult Michael from the side of the stage, is treated more like the youngest member of the family rather than as Christy’s child. 

As the oldest, Kate is also the most aware of the situation.  Fiona Byrne illustrates this brilliantly with sudden changes of voice and expression, letting us know the full extent of her worries even as she tries to conceal them from the others.  The highpoint of the action is when Marconi happens to play a traditional Irish dance tune that causes each of the sisters one by one to give in to a movement that takes them out of themselves.  The peak of this scene is when Kate who has tried to stop the others at last gives in.  Byrne plays this scene beautifully and also proves that she is the most proficient Irish step-dancer of the cast.

Both Tara Rosling as Maggie and Claire Jullien as Agnes hint at a hidden sadness but do so in opposite ways.  Rosling’s Maggie is boisterous and full of riddles and laughter though she has never forgotten the one time she had a beau.  Rosling is so powerful in playing tragedy it is a pleasant surprise to see her equally effective in playing comedy.  Jullien’s Agnes seems to have withdrawn completely into herself but when Gerry Evans comes to call on Christy, Jullien shows us through her expression that Agnes secretly wishes he had chosen her.

We are surprised to learn that Rose is 32 because of the childlike way she acts.  Yet, it is not really Diana Donnelly’s performance that gives us the greatest clues about Rose’s disability as much as the way the others treat her.  Sarena Parmar is treated so much like the child of the family that it is hard to believe that she is the one who has a child of her own.  It is certainly not motherliness that Parmar brings out in Christy but rather romantic longing, something that Gerry Evans is expert at evoking and sustaining as long as he is in her presence.  Parmar fleetingly does give us the impression that Christy can see through Evans’s fantasies, but that Christy also suppresses any such ideas since the truth would be too painful.

As Evans, Kristopher Bowman is suitably dashing, energetic and attractive.  It would be a bonus if he gave us a hint that even Evans didn’t quite believe all the tales of new opportunities that he spins, but Bowman plays him as charmer who seems unaware of a border between truth and lies.

Peter Millard is an excellent Uncle Jack.  He doesn’t play the role as some sort of relic of Raj which would make the figure a cliché.  Instead, Millard gives us a man who has identified with the native culture and religion of the Ugandans so deeply that it never occurs to him that his superiors might see that in a negative light.  Millard’s Jack is so innocent of the change he has undergone that he seems not even to know he has lost his Catholic faith.  He is distressed when he thinks he has forgotten his English vocabulary and becomes enthusiastic only when he has the chance to expound on anything Ugandan. 

The primary flaw in the production, strange to say, is Sue LePage’s set design.  LePage’s work is normally a model of balance and crisp, clean lines.  Here the set is definitely off kilter.  All of the parlour and kitchen of the Mundy sisters is crammed into the upstage left corner of the playing area leaving the downstage right area virtually bare.  LePage has added two green-painted burlap surrounds to hide the gilt proscenium uprights, but the one on stage left also hides much of the parlour and kitchen. 

Director Krista Jackson does not help matters by staging most of the action in the upstage left corner and comparatively little downstage right.  Jackson also constantly has the characters walk through what we thought were walls and windows.  If Jackson and LePage want to design a set to reflect the work as a memory play, let it all be abstract.  Do not go into the realist specifics of the brands that Kate unpacks from shopping and mix it with the abstraction of a house that whimsically does or does not have walls. 

Despite the design (especially if you can sit on house left), the ensemble acting powerfully conveys both the passing of a specific time and the survival of ancient ritual in modern times.  Dancing at Lughnasa leaves you with a tantalizing mixture of melancholy and mystery that will haunt you long after you leave the theatre. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Diana Donnelly, Sarena Parmar, Fiona Byrne, Tara Rosling and Claire Jullien; Claire Jullien, Diana Donnelly and Patrick Galligan; Fiona Byrne, Peter Millard, Tara Rosling, Sarena Parmar, Claire Jullien, Diana Donnelly and Patrick Galligan. ©2017 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.