For those of us – and there are a fair few – with Irish ancestry, cornerstones of Irish culture hold a special appeal. Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel’s poignant play inspired by his own family’s roots in Donegal, is no exception.

The best Irish drama makes you feel cosy and warm, infused with a kind of bedraggled melancholy. This production, which marks the beginning of a new season at Sheffield’s Crucible and Elizabeth Newman’s first as artistic director, achieves that strange alchemy.

Dancing at Lughnasa tells the story of the Mundy family through one summer in 1936, a summer that alters their lives irrevocably. Told through the eyes of the grown-up Michael, who travels back in time to narrate that childhood summer for us, we follow his aunts, the Mundy sisters, and their longing, loving and grieving in the face of harsh winds of change. Each sister has, in her own way, trespassed the patriarchy’s expectations of them, and we witness just what that means in 1930s Ireland. So full of fire, humour and courage, these beleaguered sisters immediately enter our sympathies and break our hearts because, of course, we know it’s not going to end well for them. The narrator slowly sows the seeds of their tragic unravelling right from the beginning, building to an inevitable swell of sadness under the harvest moon.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. There’s plenty of craic to reel you in. Siobhan O’Kelly as Maggie and Natalie Radmall-Quirke as Kate are outstanding in their ability to balance the comic with the tragic, the mundane with the majestic. This is a play about tension, about being ripped apart by opposing forces – obedience and rebellion, expression and repression, grief and joy. The jarring clash between their Catholic faith and the pagan spirituality they find, both in ‘the back hills’ of the surrounding countryside and the stories from their uncle Jack’s time as a missionary in Uganda, speaks to the tension between duty to conform to social expectation and the desire to rail against it; to dance, wild and free.

The set design evokes a cottage in the windswept hills and the heart of that home – the kitchen, of course – with great care. Above, a giant harvest moon watches over proceedings in the build-up to Lughnasa, a festival named after the pagan god Lugh that marks the start of the harvest season and celebrates abundance and rebirth. The rewards for toil are reaped and the cycle continues. Only, it doesn’t for these sisters. As the industrial revolution finally catches up with rural Ireland and the consequences of stepping outside of social norms play out, we witness the last glimpse of their household before it shatters under its own weight and disbands forever.

Something about this production was a touch too gentle, I think, and it’s hard to pin down what I mean by that. The sisters are formidable and each performance is a perfect portrayal, but I felt at times as though the men in the play were less convincing. I suppose the device it employs – having the narrator relay the tragic futures of those on stage without seeing it play out in front of us – adds to the sense of separation and makes us feel a little detached. But the sisters are the soul of the play. Alongside Newman as director, they deserve acclaim for this bittersweet beauty of a production.

By Amy Stone, Sheffield Correspondent

Main image: credit Johan Persson

 

Dancing at Lughnasa is at Sheffield Crucible until October 4, 2025. For more information, click here.