Dancing at Lughnasa

The Helix, DCU, Dublin Until Nov 19 (then touring) 8pm 18-25 01-7007000 helix.ie

“And so, when I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936, different kinds of memories offer themselves to me.” So begins Brian Friel’s celebrated memory play, with the words of Michael, the onstage narrator who doesn’t so much summon his memories as become the mildly bewildered centre of a play that swirls to life around him.

One memory “owes nothing to fact”, where “atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory”. These could double as the stage directions for a play with plenty of time for warmth but little for sentimentality. Here nostalgia still means sharp pain as much as fond recollection.

Second Age, which is exclusively devoted to staging Junior and Leaving Cert texts, revisits those memories as a time of stark change. The five Mundy sisters, living just outside of Ballybeg, witness the stability of their world interrupted by strange forces: brother Jack, a missionary priest, is repatriated from Africa intoxicated by different rituals; a new factory threatens the sisters’ livelihoods; and the famous and meaningful dance, at the harvest celebration of the god Lugh, is beckoned by the near pagan force of the radio.

David Horan directs a superb cast through a phenomenal play which, appropriately, should always be one to remember.

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