DANCING AT LUGHNASA. To 9 May.
London.
DANCING AT LUGHNASA
by Brian Friel.
Old Vic Theatre To 9 May 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 2.30pm.
Audio-described 21 April.
Captioned 14 April.
Runs 2hr 30min One interval.
TICKETS: 0870 060 6628.
www.oldvictheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 March.
Fine dramatic harvest at the old Vic.
It’s possible to follow Brian Friel’s story of five sisters on a farm outside the author’s regular fictional homeland Ballybeg during the festival of ancient harvest-god Lugh, for its human interest. Yet this goes with a structural complexity that enriches and deepens the drama.
Their story is evoked as memories by Christina’s son Michael, a child in the1936 action, but an adult as narrator. Peter McDonald’s tall figure voices from the sidelines the words of his childhood self. Then, in a masterstroke near the end, the adult Peter stops nudging the story a step forward, shifting years ahead to tell what happens to the sisters, who stand fixed like a frieze in Paule Constable’s moonlight shafts. Most writers might finish with this. But Friel continues, his characters now cast in the fate-like frame of hindsight.
They have danced in the old pagan spirit, but to music from an unreliable wireless; just one way technology’s determining their lives. These Catholic girls’ sudden irruption into dance shows a startling pagan joy resurfacing, as Uncle Jack (Finbar Lynch, suggesting firmness melted into vulnerability), a returned missionary, placidly confuses Catholicism with the local religion of his African days. Meanwhile, from the ‘modern’ world Michael’s dad (Jo Stone-Fewings, eternally smiling) breezes in and out, with his own secular paganism, a happy-go-lucky irresponsibility of promises and self-deception, showing its own accidental magic as he starts the wireless working.
Anna Mackmin’s production catches the flow of life, intermixing happy moments and sadness, catching the various moods that co-exist among a family. There’s responsible Kate, her dancing moment the only one where Michelle Fairley loses her anxious look. Andrea Corr gives Michael’s mother an innocent pleasure at re-meeting Gerry.
Susan Lynch’s Agnes, blinkered, bespectacled and often huddled in a corner, and Simone Kirby’s slow-witted yet impulsive Rose also surround Niamh Cusack’s Maggie, mixing energised happiness and contrasting seriousness.
Only the Old Vic’s in-the-round staging seems unhelpful, making Peter McDonald’s Michael flit from aisle to aisle as he observes, never linking him to the action he recalls, or indeed the farm kitchen to a sense of the land beyond.
Chris: Andrea Corr.
Maggie: Niamh Cusack.
Kate: Michelle Fairley.
Rose: Simone Kirby.
Jack: Finbar Lynch.
Agnes: Susan Lynch.
Michael: Peter McDonald.
Gerry: Jo Stone-Fewings.
Director: Anna Mackmin.
Designer: Lez Brotherston.
Lighting: Paule Constable.
Sound: Gareth Fry.
Choreographer: Scarlett Mackmin.
2009-03-13 11:28:29