Dancing at Lughnasa
- Robert Beale
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Brian Friel
Royal Exchange Theatre and Sheffield Theatres
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
October 10-November 8, 2025: 2 hrs 40 mins
Brian Friel’s 1990 Dancing at Lughnasa, a semi-autobiographical account of life in an Irish village home in the 1930s - is a real charmer; a classic now, and a play all about atmosphere and memory, rather than something that could have happened literally as it is portrayed.
This production, by Elizabeth Newman, started at Sheffield Crucible last month (where she is artistic director of Sheffield Theatres) and of course has been adapted, to some extent, from the three-sided format of the Crucible to the totally in-the-round performance area of the Royal Exchange Theatre. It’s made the transition very well.
The story is of five unmarried sisters in a household barely making ends meet. One, Christina (Martha Dunlea), has a seven-year-old son, Michael, whose adult self (Kwaku Fortune) is the on-stage narrator of the story, telling it in retrospect but also speaking his words from childhood, leaving us to imagine him in the midst of it. They have recently been joined by their brother, Father Jack (no, not that one), but an ex-missionary priest who is “shrunken and jaundiced from malaria” and has been brought home by the Church after working in a leper colony in Uganda for years - at least that’s what we’re told - and who (as we are shown) has “gone native” to the extent that he’s no longer interested in his own faith and prefers African traditional rituals instead. Gerry, the father of Christina’s child, arrives at the house from time to time, always promising to marry her and make provision for his son, and never doing either.
The music of the 1930s is an essential part of this nostalgic, haze-filled picture of a time and place now gone, as is the folk music and community knees-up of Lughnasa, the Irish traditional harvest celebration. A wonky wireless set is key to the sense of a new world impinging in the old – it has “destroyed conversation”, of course, as all new technology does.
The set, by Francis O’Connor, is a meticulously detailed house interior with invisible walls – the garden outside has to be the outer perimeter of the stage area – though the Sheffield backdrop of a cornfield is visible to only about a third of the Royal Exchange audience.
The heart of the play lies in the delineation of five different female characters, and Martha Dunlea, Rachel O’Connell (Rose), Siobhan O’Kelly (Maggie), Laura Pyper (Agnes) and Natalie Radmall-Quirke (Kate) achieve this signally. The latter in particular makes school teacher and faithful Catholic Kate full-faceted, sensible, far-sighted and caring, not just a puritanical follower of the anti-Communist Pope Pius XII. Siobhan O’Kelly has a great singing voice, too.
Frank Laverty as Father Jack is in no way shrunken or jaundiced, but rather seems to have been set free by his African experience, though pausing overlong as he seeks to recover his half-forgotten English vocabulary. There’s a bit of Ardal O’Hanlon (who played the role in the recent National Theatre production) in him, I think; maybe a bit too much.
Marcus Rutherford, as Gerry, is a performance I admired: he has caught the easy deceit and eternal optimism of the travelling salesman beautifully.
There are plenty of laughs in the show, too – maybe some that weren’t entirely clear in the original, such as the information that Father Jack was “very attached” to his houseboy over in Uganda.
And then there’s the dancing. It (in the sense of the wild abandon of the girls together as they remember the village dances of their lost youth) only happens once, and it’s quite a shock when it comes – so make the most of it.
More info and tickets here
