Cast

Synopsis

With ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’ (Loo-na-sa – the very word is evocative, intriguing), Brian Friel won the Award for the Best New Play of 1990. It is 1936 and the harvest time in County Donegal. In a house just outside Ballybeg live the five Mundy sisters, barely making ends meet. In depicting two days in their life Friel evokes not only the tensions of a group of people trapped in their domestic situation but also the wider landscape, Christian and pagan, of which they are a part.

Directors Notes

The modern Irish playwright Brian Friel has chosen as background to his play the time of ‘Lughnasa’ (Loo-na-sa), the Irish festival of Lugh, pagan god of the harvest, and with it has created a sense of contradiction, of older influences intruding on the impoverished but routinely- lived ways of five women of County Donegal.

The play is dedicated to the ‘memory of those five brave Glenties women’ whom Friel surely knew, and certainly our women of Ballybeg and their co-habitants became real for us in rehearsal as we found a pattern of their everyday movements and a music in their language. We hope that you also will enjoy getting to know them a little as you look in on their kitchen this evening.