Dancing at Lughnasa is more than just a play to Northern Ireland-born director Mick Gordon. In referring to it as the key to the door of his home, he has approached and directed it with every fibre of his being and, in the process, wrenches unimagined emotional responses from cast and audience alike. Rarely in the play’s many incarnations has the pivotal word ‘dance’ more clearly emerged as a synonym for life itself. The play presents the summer of 1936 as a time burnished with warm sunshine and luminous memories, but it also darkly recalls an Ireland in which, dancing - except with stiff arms, straight back and serious face - was a sinful, forbidden activity, fit only for the pagans celebrating the harvest feast of Lughnasa on the misty back hills behind the village of Ballybeg. In the kitchen of their isolated small-holding, the five Mundy sisters grapple with the needs, the frustrations, the social, sexual and political dilemmas of their contemporaries all around the country, their shared pent-up energy erupting with devastating power in the famous dance scene. This play of memory and imagination belongs to the narrator Michael (Sean Sloan), the illegitimate son of Chris Mundy (Laura Donnelly), the youngest sister, who, like the others, is attempting, in her own small way, to kick over the traces.
Gerard McSorley is a mischievous, yet needy, presence as their brother Jack, the failed missionary priest who has come home to die. Rhydian Jones endows Michael’s father Gerry Evans with just the right amount of easy, superficial charm, while, within the intriguingly unfinished visual imagery of Ferdia Murphy’s round set, the five actresses deliver the thinly veiled heartache of their physical and psychological confinement with deeply moving truth and integrity.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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