Dancing at Lughnasa

There is not a lot left to say about Brian Friel's most globally successful play save to repeat that it is, in all the best and…

There is not a lot left to say about Brian Friel's most globally successful play save to repeat that it is, in all the best and most precise meanings of a much-abused word, lovely. Its re-production under Patrick Mason's direction last night revived all the warmth, all the energy, all the steel and all the agony of the five Mundy spinster sisters, whose tale is told more in actions and reactions than in words, as was evident in the same director's original production in 1990 and in the several re-cast productions that played with huge success in London, New York and around the world.

The new cast on this occasion may take a few more performances to get a full grip on the unspoken nuances that are in the piece, but all the basics are already there that will make this entirely possible. Anita Reeves (who created the original raunchy and irrepressible Maggie) is now cast as Kate, the prim and proper schoolteacher who acts as the family's sheet-anchor. Yet she is not, in her characterisation, quite as prim as were her predecessors in this part and this subtly alters the fulcrum around which the other sisters lever the action without, for one moment, disturbing the validity of the family relationships.

Maggie this time is played by Anna Healy in an immensely strong and effective performance, and Chrissie, the sister whose love child with the dancing ne'er-do-well Welsh salesman is the centre of much of the sisters' loving attention, is played with vulnerability and confidence by Ali White. Lynn Cahill plays simpleminded Rose with infectious ebullience and Agnes, her main minder and associate, is played with firm commitment by Jane Brennan.

The errant Welshman, Gery Evans, who visits Chrissie and their son occasionally and unpredictably is played with choreographic panache by Steven Elliott, and the sisters' brother, Father Jack, back from the missions and no longer clear on the dogmatic distinctions between Catholicism and paganism, is played by Des Cave with an air of careful and compelling confusion. Chrissie's son Michael, the author's most important character in terms of the dramatic construction, the narrator who tells us of the ultimate fate of the family even as we are watching them loving a late summer celebration near Ballybeg, is a successfully dispassionate David Parnell.

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Once again, it is all lovely, and deeply sad.

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