Dancing at Lughnasa
Royal Exchange Manchester
★★★★☆

DANCING AT LUGHNASA is often referred to as a memory play.

Michael, (Kwaku Fortune) the engaging narrator, takes us back to 1936 when he was a seven-year-old boy living with his husbandless mother and her four sisters in Ballybeg, a small, poor community in Donegal.

But Friel’s play is much more than some nostalgic look back at a significant time in a boy’s childhood. Reviewing the UK premiere in 1990, Michael Billington described it as a strange and haunting play with elements of Chekhov and Euripides’ Bacchae. Friel captures the Chekovian everyday lives of five unfulfilled siblings constrained by life in rural Catholic Ireland, but it is also a classic Greek tragedy. Beneath the pent-up frustration lies a deep passion, while the family hurtles towards disaster.

An interloper, the return of their brother, Father Jack, destabilises the harmony of the family. Jack (Frank Laverty) has spent 25 years in a leper colony in Uganda but has been dispatched back to Ireland in disgrace. His embrace of tribal superstitions and rituals did not sit well with the Catholic hierarchy.

The revival of the play at the Royal Exchange, a co-production with Sheffield Theatres, is a careful, intelligent and absorbing honour to Friel’s work. Director Elizabeth Newman skilfully taps into Friel’s exploration of the clash between rigid Catholicism and paganism.

The four sisters, Chris (Martha Dunlea) Michael’s mother, Agnes (Laura Pyper) and Rose (Rachel O’Connell) are trying to eek out a few pennies by knitting gloves, while Maggie (Siobhan O’Kelly), the wildest sibling, and Kate (Natalie Radmill-Quirke) the eldest, is trying to keep them all in check. They are beautifully realised and despite knowing where they’re heading we keep hoping and rooting for them.

There is a marvellous moment when a fierce jig from the radio sends them all, even the prim Kate, into a frenzied dance worthy of any pagan ritual.

A mention too for Marcus Rutherford as Gerry, Michael’s feckless father who periodically enters the family’s life creating emotional havoc. A man full of empty promises who seems to cast a mystical spell over the women.

Francis O’Connor has created a gorgeous set beautifully incorporating a rural landscape within the space.

Friel is a master of poetic drama and Dancing at Lughnasa remains a gem in his canon.

Runs until November 8. Box office: 0161 833 9833, royalexchange.co.uk