Seeing Dancing at Lughnasa at the Lyric Theatre reminded me that this play is to Ireland what Long Day's Journey into Night is to America. The esteem in which Friel’s impressionistic work is universally held will be both friend and foe to the Lyric's revival: the crowds will come but that is not to say that unreserved adulation will ensue.
Paul O’Mahony’s set is a deceptively simple rural kitchen whose thatch roof transforms in to a giant flash bulb capturing, between scenes, the fleeting memories of a distant Irish Summer that Michael Evans offers the audience.
Each flash tugs at the spectator, dragging them out of the previous memory.
Annabelle’s Comyn’s Mundy sisters exist in a state of stale and mundane ennui; all that breaks the cycle is the wireless and the notion of dancing. Friel said that this was a play about "the nagging idea of dance…as memory, as dream-memory, as a substitute for language", it is also about the impotence of womanhood.
This production, though thoroughly enjoyable at times, fails to inject the desire and hunger in to the dancing scenes that they require and that audiences have come to expect. Similarly absent is the ache of loss and the powerlessness of womanhood that Friel’s play should both evoke and inspire.
Comyn's revival gives the audience moments of yearning and hysteria, but they are both in somewhat short supply.
By Eve Rosato
