Tonight:
9°c
Latest: Policeman admits murdering his fiancee — also a constable — then staging a fake car crash days before they were due to marry in St Lucia
More...
New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Anna Mackmin.
Cast: Andrea Corr, Naimh Cusack, Michelle Fairley, Susan Lynch, Simone Kirby, Finbar Lynch, Peter McDonald, Jo Stone-Fewings
Description: Anna Mackmin directs Brian Friel's drama, which follows the fortunes of five sisters in 1930s rural Ireland. Starring Andrea Corr, Simone Kirby, Niamh Cusack, Susan Lynch and Michelle Fairley.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0870060 6628
Website: www.oldvictheatre.com
Extra info: Food, Pub
Outstanding pathos: Susan Lynch as Agnes and Jo Stone-Fewings as Gerry at the Old Vic
After show: Andrea Corr, who plays Chris, Kevin Spacey, Brian Friel and Sonia Friedman at the first night party
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.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
This is a thrilling piece of theatre - a must see. A moment captured in the lives of five highly individual sisters in a remote part of Ireland in the 30s as they consider their trapped lives and opportunities missed. It's hugely funny yet painfully poignant at the same time. The performances are top notch and in particular Michelle Fairley as the tense fraught martriarchal sister, Finbar Lynch as the returning missionary priest who has foudn greater pleasure in tribal traditions and his local hosueboy and the exuberant and breathtaking Niamh Cusack as the sister, there for everyone, trying always to see the pint glass half full. Brilliant stuff.
- Paul Walsh, London, UK
