‘Memories… like the corners of my mind…misty water-coloured memories of the way we were… scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind’, sang Barbara Streisand in one of Hollywood’s great movies. The fruit of Irish dramatist Brian Friel’s memories did not result in one of the great ballads, rather, he wove out of them, his play, ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’, one of the finest Irish plays of the twentieth century.
Friel loosely based his play on observations of the lives of his mother and aunts who lived in the Glenties, on Ireland’s west coast of Donegal. ‘Dancing at Lugnasa’ is set in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. The character of Friel is played in the play by the narrator, Michael Evans, an adult who recounts the year 1936 when he was just seven years old, and spending the summer in his aunts cottage. He recounts those late summer days that he spent with the Mundy family, his mum, Christina, his aunties, Rose, Agnes, Maggie and Kate, his uncle, Jack and the visits that he received from his transient father, Gerry. The play’s title is a reference to the Celtic festival of Lughnasa that takes place every August, a festival that is a celebration of the first fruits of the season and the beginning of the harvest.
It isn’t the laughter that stands out in ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’. The times were marked by the Mundy family enduring financial hardship and personal loneliness (the women were all without permanent partners). What Michael remembers the most is when his mum and his sisters would put on their new Marconi radio and, without inhibition, danced together, brushing off the hardships that surrounded them.
The current Epicentre Theatre Company revival, directed by Abi Rayment, serves Friel’s masterpiece well. The creative team and the cast have come together to vividly bring the world of Michael and the Mundy sisters to life.
The production’s only Irish born actor play Colin Keating poignantly played the lynchpin role of Michael. In a nice directorial touch, whenever Keating somersaulted from his chair off stage on to the stage proper, it signified his return to childhood. Alan Hanson played the sad figure of Father Jack, back from his time in Africa and fast losing his memory. Matt Rossner played the enigmatic Gerry, Michael’s mostly absent father.
The five Mundy sisters were well played featuring Wendy Morton as the mother figure, Kate, Helen Scaysbrook as the family’s joker, Margaret, Amy Robertson as the quiet and contemplative Agnes, Clare McAuley played the unfortunate Rose, in her early thirties and suffering from a developmental disability, and Rachel Perks who played Michael’s 26 year old mother, emotionally torn apart from Gerry’s unannounced visits.
The gist, the kernel of Friel’s bittersweet memory play, of life not living not living up to childhood dreams and expectations, can be found in Michael’s opening address to the audience. Michael says. ‘even though I was only a child of seven at the time I know I had a sense of unease, some awareness of a widening breach between what seemed to be and what was, of things changing too quickly before my eyes, of becoming what they ought not be”.
This Epicentre Theatre Company production plays the Zenith Theatre, corner McIntosh and Railway streets, Chatswood until Saturday October 2, 2010.