DANCING AT LUGHNASA

Brian Friel

OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 2013

This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried Munday sisters eking out their lives in the small village of Ballybeg in Ireland in 1936. We meet them at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest. The action of the play is told through the memory of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters as he remembers the five women who raised him, his mother and four maiden aunts. He is only seven in 1936, the year his elderly uncle Jack, a priest, returns after serving for twenty-five years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony.

For the young boy, two other disturbances occur that summer. The sisters acquire their first radio and he meets his father for the first time, a charming Welsh drifter. From these small events spring the cracks that destroy the foundation of the family forever.

In Dancing at Lughnasa he employs the central motif of dancing and music to explore themes of Irish cultural identity, nostalgia, historical change, and pagan ritual. Widely regarded as Brian Friel's masterpiece, this haunting play is Friel's tribute to the spirit and valour of the past.

CAST

Michael: Rory Keary

Kate: Pat Lacey

Maggie: Aisling Coleman

Aggie: Emma Gallagher

Rosie: Lizzy Noone

Chris: Jane Mehigan

Gerry: Adam Burke

Jack: Colm O'Maolmhuire

CREW

Director: Ronald Jones

Producer: Carol Boylan

Stage Management: Aga Daly

Set Design: Ronald Jones

Set Construction/Decor: Billy Fitzgerald, Paul Jordan, Eugene Osborne, Kevin O’Malley, Deirdre Allen

Lighting: Richard Norman-Wright, Rory Norman-Wright

Sound: Ronald Jones

Sound Editing: Graham Tully    

Costumes: Máire Keogh

Properties: Suzanne Healy

Kites: Poppy Sheridan    

Front of House: Áine McGuinness and Group Members

Poster: fastnetgraphics

Poster Photograph: Shenick Island Photography

Programme: Ronald Jones, Kevin O’Malley

Photographs: Daily Photography