Dancing and Remembering: A Contextual Reading of Brian Friel’s Play Dancing at Lughnasa

Abstract

In Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), the Irish playwright describes the last joyful moments in the lives of five unmarried Irish sisters who live together in a poor cottage in the fictional small town of Ballybeg in North Ireland. The retrospective tale that is narrated by the adult Michael, who is also the illegitimate son of Chris –one of the five sisters- portrays the forces that led to the collapse of the family in the 1936 summer during the Lughnasa festival celebrations. The hybrid form of drama and storytelling is Brian Friel’s device to escape mega narrative and focus on the stories of individuals and small families. This de-familiarization of traditional literary conventions enables him to surrender grand history to personal stories. Furthermore, Friel is experimenting with the memory play form as he believes that man’s memory anamnesis should not be trusted as factual. Furthermore, dance also plays a significant role in the play where almost every character dances at a certain point, but it is how every character involves in the act of dancing that illuminates him/her to the theatergoers. Indeed, dancing in the play is a release that connotes unfulfilled desires and hopes that cannot be expressed in words. In short, Brian Friel is the playwright who most probably defines Ireland to the outside world through analyzing the complexities of Irish culture