Brian Friel's 19-year-old memory play, Dancing At Lughnasa, famously looks back in sadness to the disappointed lives of five Catholic sisters in County Donegal in 1936. I doubt it deserves quite the instant-classic accolade it has achieved. And nothing about Anna Mackmin’s in-the-round production, a theatrical form at odds with the play’s intimacy, convinces me otherwise.

“Atmosphere is more real than incident,” insists Peter McDonald’s gesticulating but semi-detached narrator, Michael, betraying the fact that Dancing At Lughnasa loses its dramatic impetus — distracted by the discreet charms of remembrance.

The play is, though, shot through with scenes of outstanding pathos and rueful humour — as in the sisters’ exuberant, stamping dance of defiance against the constricting dullness of their loveless existence.

Friel sets his play in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War blazed a trail of Left- wing defiance and Stalin’s Great Terror impends. Political and social change is in the rather Chekhovian air.

Friel catches the mood but does not make enough of it. Even in County Donegal they are catching up with the past as the Industrial Revolution looms over Ireland.

And the sisters’ brother, Finbar Lynch’s disturbed, disturbing priest, Jack, has returned sick from Uganda, his Catholic faith replaced by enthusiasm for polygamy and his house-boy.

Perhaps because of him the oldest sister, Kate, is about to lose her teaching job? McDonald’s impassive Michael, love-child of one of the sisters, Chris, broods over the action. As narrator he looks back at lost family times from the vantage point of the Fifties, yet takes part in the 1936 scenes as a child, investing the play with a disquieting, spectral strangeness.

Designer Lez Brotherston’s interesting, expressionistic design is dominated by a huge, dead tree, beneath which a kitchen-table, heating stove and sink rest on paving stones, themselves fringed by vegetation.

True to the spirit of Garcia Lorca’s The House Of Bernard Alba, also written in 1936, where a religious fanatic of a mother locks away her sexually yearning daughters, Dancing At Lughnasa keeps four dejected but spirited young women under the control of Michelle Fairley’s superb epitome of prim, Catholic rigour. The girls — Niamh Cusack’s ardent Maggie, Simone Kirby’s sexually smitten Rose, Susan Lynch’s Agnes and Andrea Corr’s Chris — all put on a fine, sisterly show. But there is too much aimless domestic gossiping, long-winded ruminating over the local dance for which they now may be too old.

Corr’s Chris is mother to Michael and her sisters behave like greedy voyeurs when Jo Stone-Fewings’s father of her child makes one of his rare appearances, eccentric in his panama hat, braces and cloying charm. Dance, the play’s suitable, metaphorical replacement for sex, engages the couple, though not for long.

Borrowing a thematic trick from J B Priestley’s Time And The Conways, Friel’s Michael tells us what will become of the sisters and then tracks back in devastating dramatic irony: we see the sisters aspiring to a happiness we know they will never achieve.

A flawed but fascinating Chekhovian view of Thirties women fighting to escape their destinies.