The Spirit of a Nation in Five People, Two Days, and One House. Wider Reading (Drama) 18: Dancing at Lughnasa

It is 1936 and harvest time in County Donegal. In a house just outside the village of Ballybeg live the five Mundy sisters, barely making ends meet, their ages ranging from twenty-six up to forty. The two male members of the household are Brother Jack, a missionary priest, repatriated from Africa by his superiors after twenty-five years, and the seven-year-old child of the youngest sister. In depicting two days in the life of this ménage, Brian Friel evokes not simply the interior landscape of a group of human beings trapped in their domestic situation, but the wider landscape, interior and exterior, Christian and pagan, of which they are nonetheless a part.

National identity is a topic frequently favoured by Irish playwrights and their work, and Dancing at Lughnasa (pronounced loo-nasa) is no exception. Ireland has always been one of the less affluent nations of Western Europe, but in 1936, trapped within the height of the world-wide Great Depression, that chronic economic hardship is aggravated. The village of Ballybeg is the playwright’s own fictional creation, and is the location of many of his plays. Donegal, on the other hand, is a real place, one of the counties making up the Republic of Ireland. Friel has deep personal connections with his place; as a child he spent an extensive amount of time there, summering with his mother's sisters, and he has since settled in Donegal himself.

In addition this personal significance, Donegal also occupies a distinctive place in the Irish national consciousness. The county is shrouded in romantic mystique, and has always lagged behind the rest of Ireland in terms of economic and social development. However, because of this economic backwardness, many of the customs, beliefs, and cultural practices of traditional Irish life have been preserved in Donegal. And it is in Donegal where the ancient festival of La Lughnasa is perhaps most vividly celebrated. The title of the play refers to the celebratory dancing associated with this pagan festival. The setting is thus a kind of mythical location, a small sanctuary of authentic Irish life that modernity has yet to reach. Or is it? As the narrator, states in the opening monologue, his memories of Ballybeg in the summer of ‘36 are full of "a sense of . . . things changing too quickly before my eyes." He recalls a "widening breach between what seemed to be and what was, of things . . . becoming what they ought not to be." It is the experience of change played out against the deeply traditional Donegal setting that provides much of the play's discord and pity.

Dancing at Lughnasa - Identity Quotations