Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa is a brave choice for Nottingham Youth Theatre's 14-19s group and this tale of approaching middle-age and upheaval in 1930s County Donegal was told with aplomb.
The action centres around Michael telling the story of the summer of 1936 when he was 7 and living with his mother and aunts in Ballybeg, rural County Donegal. This all told in a mixture of flashback with an actor reading the imagined child's lines and in direct address with Michael talking as a grown man. In 1936 his uncle, Father Jack who had been a missionary in Africa, has now returned to the family home for the first time in 25 years after contracting Malaria. There is also a visit from his stay-away father, Gerry, a traveling gramophone salesman intent on joining the International Brigade and sailing away to fight Franco.
However, these seem incidental as the real drama of the piece is the interplay between Michael's mother and 4 aunts and their relationship with the other important arrival of the summer of 1936, Marconi - their first wireless set. The sisters complemented each other nicely and were well considered in their characterisation: Kate as the prim local school teacher, Agnes and Rose who knit woolen gloves for a measly income, Maggie who flits and floats whilst attempting to make soda bread and Chris, Michael's mother, who is prone to depression after the fleeting visits of Gerry. By the end of the play we learn that within a year from moments we spend with the Mundys that Father Jack will be dead, Agnes and Rose will be gone after the opening of a knitting factory makes them jobless, Chris will be working at the factory that causes her sisters' departure, Kate will have lost her job as a teacher and Gerry's visits will be more and more infrequent. The play's great quality comes from the way an audience can appreciate the innocent pleasures of the summer of 1936 whilst knowing what the impending years will bring, both personally and on global scale.
This, as said before, was a brave piece both for its breadth of reference and subject as well as the Donegal accents but the young actors managed it well. Plaudits must go to Director Helen Barton for her work with them and her neat staging of the play. A fine turn is given by Hannah Lane as the uptight Kate whilst there are great moments in which Mistee Ingham's Rose returns from a tryst in the back hills or when Martha Myers-Lowe's Maggie flirts with a receptive Gerry in front of her indignant sister. More could have been made of Gerry's role and interactions with the sisters, especially that with Agnes whom he takes a special interest in but the key relationship of Gerry and Chris was well pitched. An honorable mention in dispatches must also go to Jake McCullough who's Father Jack's fragile state was well observed and although most laughs came from the cloud of hair whitening talc when ever he removed his hat, his performance contained many recounted anecdotes of his time in Africa which caused laughter in the audience and riled huffs from Kate. Whilst the performance, their first, did feel like an opening night and with nerves settled this will prove a treat for those keen on this kind of realist drama and congratulations must go to a director and cast who have made this difficult text accessible and entertaining.
Dancing at Lughnasa: ***
Image courtesy of Nottingham Youth Theatre.
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