The Ritual of Memory in Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa

Abstract

Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa premiered at the storied Abbey Theatre on April 24, 1990, exactly ten years after his masterpiece Translations had appeared. Like Translations, Lughnasa expressed the tenor of Ireland as the end of the century approached. As Terence Brown has argued, Lughnasa “seemed a work of special contemporary relevance,” depicting a world “on the cusp of change” as “older forms of cultural expression are being replaced.” It is a play about a world whose transformation is imminent, and the trauma that such transformation brings—a telling harbinger of the Ireland just emerging in the 1990s, a world of astonishing new wealth and material largesse, but whose emergence would mark a stark break with the past that many would soon lament. The delicate balance of historical rupture and loss with celebration and warmth constitutes one of the triumphs of the play. When Pat O’Connor translated the play into a film that appeared in 1998, he used the medium of film to explore its quiet, interior drama and to bring into relief many of Friel’s most pressing concerns. O’Connor’s realization on screen is keenly attentive to the major concerns of Lughnasa; yet at the same time the film may be the more historically acute and probing study of the Ireland of the 1930s, depicting its transformation into the twentieth-century realities while also illustrating the long-standing rituals and customs that it would yield only reluctantly to the modern age. Although many critics dismissed the film as too sentimental and lacking in Friel’s irony, in fact O’Connor presents a complex, intricate portrait of family, memory, and history that resists nostalgia and challenges our conceptions of Irish identity.