29 pages • 58 minutes read
Brian FrielDancing At Lughnasa
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act IChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I Summary
The play introduces its setting—a small country cottage in Ballybeg, Ireland—through the looking-back perspective of Michael Evans. Michael recalls the summer of 1936 when he was seven years old, living with his mother—Christina—and four aunts—Kate, Maggie, Rose, and Agnes. Michael relates that during this summer, the family bought their first wireless radio. They discussed naming the radio Lugh after the pagan god of the upcoming Lughnasa Harvest Festival, but the staunchly Catholic Kate disapproved. Thus, they agreed to name the radio for its brand, Marconi.
Michael also explains that during the summer, his uncle Jack returned to Ireland sick with malaria after twenty-five years serving at a Ugandan leper colony. Michael suggests that in his memory, the sound of Marconi is linked to Jack’s return. Jack seems to have forgotten his sisters’ names—referring to them as Okawa, his Ugandan house boy—along with many words in the English language. He also appears to have foregone the family’s Catholic faith for beliefs of Ugandan tribes. Michael recalls an old picture of his uncle in British military uniform, commenting on the drastic difference between his childhood imagination and the reality of Jack’s condition.
The play transitions from Michael’s present-day monologue to a scene from the summer of 1936. The scene opens on the cottage interior, where Agnes knits gloves, Rose carries turf, Maggie makes mash, and young Michael makes kites offstage. The women muse about the Lughnasa harvest dance. Rose mentions a boy from the hills, Danny Bradley, with whom she is infatuated. The sisters express discomfort because Rose is “simple” and they believe Danny intends to take advantage of her. Rose remarks that her sisters are jealous because they have all—for the most part—given up on romance themselves. Meanwhile, Marconi plays occasional fragments of songs to which the sisters playfully sing along. Their playful mood tapers to a hush whenever they remember Jack.
Young Michael comes into the room with his kites and Maggie jokingly bets with him that the kites will never leave the ground. Kate comes home from shopping and dotes on Michael, praising the kites, but remarking on their “scarifying” (8) artwork. Rose and Agnes talk about a local boy named Sweeney, who was badly burned in a ritual bonfire on the first day of Lughnasa. Kate scolds the sisters for talking about the festival, claiming it is an insult to Catholicism. The sisters tell Kate of their plans to attend the dance, but Kate forbids it, reminding them that this is “Jack’s home” (13) and they must never forget that. Jack then wanders in and out of the room, confused about who they are and where he is.
Kate brings news of people she’s seen while she was out. She mentions stopping by Austin Morgan’s store, which Rose chides her about, knowing Kate is secretly fond of Austin. Kate mentions seeing Bernie O’ Donnell, and Maggie fondly recalls a dance wherein she and her date beat Bernie in a dancing competition. Christina turns on Marconi, and Maggie leads them in a wild dance to the Irish song “The Mason’s Apron.” At first, Kate cries in remonstration. Gradually, she resigns herself to her own private, controlled, but deeply-emotional dance. When the music suddenly stops, Kate nags Rose and Agnes for splurging their glove money on a new radio. The sisters tell her they do a lot of unpaid housework and just want to have some fun. When Christina suggests throwing out Marconi, Kate is against the idea. She claims this would be a waste of money, but the audience recognizes her argument as another moment of Kate’s concealed romanticism.
Michael’s absentee father, Gerry, arrives at the cottage. Christina goes out to the garden to meet him. Gerry tells Christina he hitched a ride to Ballybeg with a man he met in a bar who happened to be going there. He also tells Christina he saw a brown cow with a unicorn horn—a good omen—on his way to the house. Christina asks about a rumor that Gerry was teaching dancing lessons in Dublin. Gerry confirms that he taught dancing, but is now selling gramophones. He recalls Christina’s dancing and how much fun they used to have. When the song “Dancing in the Dark” comes over the Marconi, they dance together passionately. Gerry says he wants to come back and marry Christina in two weeks, but Christina remains level-headed, saying marriage is not in his nature. Gerry claims that this time will be different because all the omens are right.
The sisters watch Christina and Gerry from the window. Kate remarks that Christina’s face is contorted with happiness. She criticizes Gerry, and Agnes runs off in tears, calling Kate a “righteous bitch” (35). It’s clear that Agnes is secretly fond of Gerry. Kate reflects on the Sweeney boy burned by Lughnasa’s fire, remarking that it feels like everything is about to collapse.
Jack wanders into the room, musing about the pagan traditions he has picked up in Africa, including sacrificing roosters. He says illegitimate children like Michael are common in Ugandan households. Suddenly, Jack recalls where he is and shares a memory of Christina waving as he left twenty-five years ago. Kate is excited by his recollection, and the play pauses on this hopeful moment.
Present-day Michael punctures this hope by explaining that Kate soon after lost her job at the local schoolhouse, supposedly because enrollment numbers were down, but actually because the parish priest was suspicious of Jack’s theological beliefs. Michael says that although Kate was right about a lot of things, she was wrong about Gerry, who came back to dance with his mother in a kind of spiritual union.
The play briefly resumes past-tense action as Jack picks up the sticks from Michael’s kites. He strikes them together in a Ugandan rhythm and dances. Kate stops him and gently remonstrates, saying the sticks belong to a child.
Act I Analysis
In Act One, Friel establishes dramatic tension between Kate’s strict Catholic values and the more free-spirited paganism she observes around her. Friel also illustrates the striking similarities between Irish pagan rituals—exemplified by the Festival of Lughnasa—and the Ugandan pagan rituals described by Jack. Both Irish and Ugandans celebrate the harvest with dancing, drinking, and fire. Kate sees these rituals not only as threats to Catholicism, but to the safety and well-being of her family, whose financial and social standing is precariously balanced. She contemplates the Sweeney boy—burned by Lughnasa’s fires—as an exemplar of the harm that could befall her family. At the end of Act One, she prophetically reflects that “control is slipping away; that the whole thing is so fragile it can’t be held up much longer. It’s all about to collapse” (35).
Kate perceives the escapist abandonment of music and dancing as a constant threat to her family’s reputation, warning that the “whole countryside” will laugh at them for forgetting their age and responsibilities. She warns of the transformative powers of pleasure, noting that Christina’s “whole face alters when she’s happy” (33). She maligns the songs of Marconi for triggering flights of romantic fancy, chiding her sisters, “If you knew your prayers as well as you know the words of those aul pagan songs!” (35) She also recognizes her family’s dangerous precarity in extravagant purchases such as Marconi, scolding Rose and Agnes for using their glove money to purchase the radio. Friel demonstrates, however, that Kate’s relationship with these temptations is more complex than her presentation. When Christina suggests throwing out the malfunctioning radio, Kate protests strongly, demonstrating her susceptibility to escapism. When her sisters dance to “The Mason’s Apron,” Kate initially nags them, but eventually joins in her own quietly emotional dance. This dance can also be read as a demonstration of Catholic expression: filled with heated emotion that is shamefully repressed.
Marconi also serves as a mechanism for Friel to explore memory, both through Michael Evan’s nostalgia for 1930s music and the sputtering quality of the radio’s transmission. The start-and-stop quality of Marconi’s music playing seems to mimic the staticky nature of Jack’s memory as he recalls fragments of past experience and English words, intermittently forgetting where he is. Michael confirms this association, with his reflection that in his memory, Jack’s arrival felt linked to Marconi. Like the signal, Jack is constantly searching, wandering the house in confusion.
Jackis not the only wanderer who turns up in Act One. The arrival of Michael’s wayward father, Gerry, serves both to stir and dampen the romantic spirits of the sisters. All five unmarried women speak of suitors past and present, and all—for various reasons—cannot realistically pursue them. Maggie is—by her own estimation—too old and overweight for romance. In addition to being busy with her teaching job and household responsibilities, Kate seems to admire a man above her social station. The object of Agnes’s infatuation is Gerry, whom she cannot pursue for fear of hurting Christina. And Christina herself understands that Gerry could never be a stable partner, recognizing that it is in his nature to move around. The only sister who doesn’t seem resigned to relinquishing romantic relationships is Rose, who is “simple,” and therefore at risk of manipulation by men.
Jack is also aligned with many symbols of longing and dubious hope. Michael reflects on the romantic, saint-like quality Jack was assigned, beatifically memorialized in a twenty-five-year-old photo of Jack in his British Army uniform. Kate is eager for Jack to begin leading mass, fulfilling her image of him as an ideal Catholic. Of course, the reality of Jack’s physical, mental, and ideological condition dramatically contrasts with the sisters’ hopes and expectations. When Kate unpacks the quinine for Jack’s malaria while complaining about the Festival of Lughnasa, she experiences an almost Freudian slip: “I’m telling you—off its head—like a fever in the place. That’s the quinine. The doctor says it won’t cure malaria but it might help to contain it…” (11). Kate struggles to contain the “fever” of her sister’s desires and her brother’s Ugandan paganism, though by the end of Act One, it is clear that she can’t contain it much longer.
