The Stage

Dancing at Lughnasa

Published Friday 6 March 2009 at 12:00 by Jeremy Austin

It’s all about Andrea Corr. Not because she is the glamorous lead singer of an internationally renowned rock band, but because this is a beautifully endearing debut.

It is actually hard to believe that she has never acted on stage before. This is surely a lie. Sure, she’s appeared in films - Evita and The Commitments to name two - but that, as we know, is a completely different discipline.

On stage, she teases out her dialogue, understanding completely the rhythm of language - probably understandable as she is a singer - but is also so obviously immersed in her character that all her acting and reacting is natural. This, again as we know, is impossible to fake.

She is fortunate that she is performing in a modern classic - a play so beautifully crafted that it has already become nailed to the school curriculum like Luther’s text to a church door as an example of What a Play Is.

She is fortunate that Anna Mackmin is one of those directors who understands how to tease the life from within a production rather than impose some prescriptive notion of how it should be.

And she is fortunate that assembled around her is a company that performs as if it has become some biological entity, so in tune are all its constituent parts. The sisters talk in the same rhythms and with the same levels of hysteria, pleasure, anger and sadness, just as they would had they been living together all their lives.

It’s almost 20 years since Dancing at Lughnasa debuted, and Meryl Streep has starred in the film, but this, in the round at the Old Vic, is as near a perfect production as you’ll see.