[In mid-April 1990, Dancing at Lughnasa premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In the review below, Armistead finds the play "[r]ich with atmosphere, redolent with an admittedly equivocal nostalgia … unfolding like a slow smooch to the music of time. "]

A wheatfield spotted with poppies is the backdrop for Brian Friel's new play which reopens an Abbey expansive and spruce after phase one of a £5m development project. If the theatre's management is looking ahead (smart new bar and foyer mark this stage of the facelift), this première from one of Ireland's most distinguished writers finds its artistic team in nostalgic mood.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a memory play, set in the summer of 1936, which takes a sad, affectionate look at a rural Ireland inhabited by doting spinster aunts whose meagre livelihoods—knitting gloves for the local shop, teaching in the local school—are shortly to be destroyed by the advance of industry and the retreat of the rural population.

The drama of the play covers a brief three-week period, but its awareness is moulded by half a century of hind-sight which enfolds it in the desolate narrative of Michael, lovechild of one of the sisters, son to them all, who appears throughout as a balding, unexceptional adult (Gerard McSorley), answering for the memory and promise of his invisible seven-year-old self.

The effect this has is to create an impressionistic moment in a personal history which, unusually, even perversely, is defined by events that fall outside the play's dramatic scope: Michael's word is all we have for the imminent breakup of the household, for his father's absconsion to an International Brigade he never got round to joining, and for his great-uncle's impenitent death. Yet this knowledge is as essential to the mood of the play as Joe Vanek's largely untrodden meadows are to its sense of ambience.

Pivotal to its theme—though typically incidental to its action—is the ageing uncle Jack (Barry McGovern), ex-chaplain to a Ugandan leper colony, who has been sent into early retirement after becoming too sympathetic by half towards native rites and customs. He has arrived back culturally and intellectually dislocated to the extent of forgetting his English vocabulary and refusing to celebrate Mass.

His confusion puts him in sympathy with the Lughnasa of the title, a pre-Christian harvest ritual not dissimilar, Friel argues, to African fertility festivals. It involves dancing, sacrifices and a certain intoxication with the pleasures of being alive. One by one the aunts, po-faced, simple, frowsy as they are, fall to its spell. The best scene of Patrick Mason's magnificently acted production whips them up into a frenzy of stamping and skipping, which could be labelled Bacchanalian were it not for the eccentric individuality of each participant in the dance.

The prim jigging of Frances Tomelty's schoolma'amish Kate contrasts with the inelegant earthiness of Anita Reeves' Maggie, the unstructured, childish high-kicking of Bríd Ní Neachtain's Rose sets off the sweet neatness of Brid Brennan's Agnes and the ripe sensuality of Catherine Byrne's Chris, whose liaison with a raffish Welsh gramo-phone salesman—father of her child—is founded on a shared passion for the dance.

Rich with atmosphere, redolent with an admittedly equivocal nostalgia, this dramatically unresolved play has a heady appeal, unfolding like a slow smooch to the music of time.