[In the excerpt below, Krause claims Dancing at Lughnasa "lacks the essential and fulsome poetry and rhythm of dramatic speech" and criticizes Friel for writing a play "that is more attractive to the eye than the ear."]

This matter, I think, is of importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form.

—J. M. Synge's Preface to The Playboy of the Western World (1907)

It should not come as a surprise that a play might be both theatrically effective and artistically disappointing at the same time. This is not an uncommon contradiction in the theatre, where the visual imagery sometimes dominates the verbal imagery. Synge insisted that language in the theatre should have a literary as well as a theatrical context, that the words should be "rich and copious," and based upon "the reality which is the root of all poetry." In Dancing at Lughnasa Friel has created a world of genuine characters, deeply rooted in reality, but his words, the language of his people, far from being rich or copious, lack the essential and fulsome poetry and rhythm of dramatic speech. He has written a play that is more attractive for the eye than the ear.

After seeing a very popular production of Dancing at Lughnasa and then reading the published text, I suspect that audience approval and positive reviews do not automatically mean high artistic achievement. The play has been acclaimed in Dublin, London, and New York; the casts have performed with distinction, and with comparable contributions by directors and set designers; but Friel seems to have been reluctant to probe below the attractive surface of his predictable and comforting reality in order to release the rich poetry of drama. He has constructed a memory-play that recreates the aura of an idyllic past, an indulgence in nostalgia that calls for a sentimental tone and flattened language that do not lead to a very complex or profound experience. Webster's Dictionary provides an appropriate definition of nostalgia: "a wistful or excessively sentimental sometimes morbid yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition."

Friel's narrator remembers a wistful, often comic, and sometimes morbid tale about the frustrated but animated five Mundy sisters in the little town of Ballybeg and their attempts to escape from their uneventful and uncertain daily lives. Michael, the narrator, now a young man, relives what he calls a "nostalgic" time back in 1936 when he was a boy of seven, particularly two days of that period that "[fascinate]" him so much he says he perceives them as "dream music [ … ] so alluring and so mesmeric that the afternoon is bewitched, maybe haunted, by it [ … ] everybody seems to be floating on those sweet sounds."

Part of the problem of the play might be that those alluring visual sounds, often dance sounds, become so sweet and mesmeric that we are meant to float along with Michael's sentimental reverie as the only way to ease the inevitable hardships of life. The dream reaches a high point when his five frustrated aunts, reacting impulsively to the sudden music that blares out of their eccentric radio set, the "Marconi," break into a frenzy of uninhibited dancing, as their tribute to the festival of Lughnasa, the Celtic god of August whose pagan ritual commemorates the annual harvest. That wild dance, which exhilarates the audience as well as the aunts, becomes the central and perhaps too easily earned symbol of the play, though it is theatrically an exciting visual and rhythmic symbol of Friel's theme of repression and sublimation. It is a memorable moment, and while it is enough to sustain Michael's haunted nostalgia, it cannot entirely encourage us to overlook the morbid or hard moments that run through the play, the collapse of the family and the tragic death of two aunts. It is a commonplace emblem of romantic poetry, often parodied for its oversimplified sentimentality, that love conquers all, amor vincit omnia. Are we now to take comfort from the Lughnasa emblem that dance conquers all, saltatio vincit omnia? Perhaps not, happy lovers and dancers might reply, but it feels so good. Feeling is all?

Another character who apparently believes that dance conquers all is Gerry Evans, the errant and ne'er-do-well father of Michael by the unwed and impressionable mother Chris. Gerry, however, is so unreliable and unbelievable, he leaves behind too many false hopes and disenchanted dancing aunts. Then in something like a quixotic afterthought, he decides to go off to fight for the Loyalists in Spain—much to the distress of the Catholic loyalist Kate—but this lone reference to the world of strife outside Ballybeg in the 1930s is too marginal to be developed in any significant way. Furthermore, many mature people in the audience, unlike the innocent characters on the stage, know something about the implications of the Spanish Civil War. Perhaps the well-meaning but irresponsible Gerry is a dangling and shallow character who undermines the sublimation motif by turning the vital ritual of dancing into a frivolous caper.

The most interesting, and the only intriguing and complex, character in the play is Father Jack, the dying and distracted uncle who, after returning from twenty-five years as a Missionary priest in a leper colony in Africa, has, ironically, exchanged his Catholic faith for an acceptance of the Ugandan faith. In his vivid if sometimes broken memory we hear him embracing the powerful African ritual of the harvest, which is curiously close to the pagan ritual of Lughnasa. Here Friel's implications are enormously resonant. He seems to have a unique gift for creating such eccentrically and independently eloquent characters as Father Jack; for example, there is also that fantasizing and frolicking jester, Casimir O'Donnell, in Aristocrats.

Except for Father Jack, and in a much less impressive way Michael, who is so sentimentally garrulous in his celebration of nostalgia, none of the characters, particularly the crucial aunts, are eloquent, let alone copious with words. Seamus Deane in his glowing introduction to Friel's Selected Plays (1984) correctly reminds us that "Brilliance in the theatre has, for Irish dramatists, been linguistic." Speaking of some of the six plays in this volume, Deane says these are "fiercely spoken plays," and then adds: "Language, in a variety of modes and presented in a number of recorded ways, dominates to the exclusion of almost everything else."

Is it not strange to note, therefore, that in Dancing at Lughnasa, which has been called one of Friel's most successful plays, almost everything else seems to dominate, especially dancing, to the exclusion of language—aside from the ironic eloquence of Father Jack—with no sign of a variety of modes or "recorded ways," whatever they might be? To be blunt, the five aunts seldom if ever resort to richly or "fiercely spoken" words; no striking or memorable phrases leap out at us; no words I wanted to take pleasure in or remember when I saw the play and later read the text. If Friel decided to write this play in a flattened style, using commonplace words because his Ballybeg people in reality lived commonplace lives, he failed to allow for the distinction between life and art. It should be obvious that the artist does much more than hold up a mirror or tape recorder to catch life, which cannot be reduced to literally accurate words or pictures. Synge and O'Casey in drama, Wordsworth and Whitman in poetry, among many others in both fields, have vividly illustrated how the oral tradition, the spoken language, can provide abundant sources of rich and poetic words, and a wide range of idiomatic imagery.

An examination of some representative passages in Friel's play indicates that the characters seldom speak in vivid, rhythmic, or figurative language. Michael's comments do not rise above gushes of nostalgia that are intended to pass for "poetical" memory, and there are no signs of genuinely colorful or striking talk by the aunts, who are denied introspective or complex thoughts of any length or depth. Kate has only one relatively long but plain speech about how the family is "collaps[ing]." Maggie drifts into an unremarkable and rambling speech about a dance contest. Rose explains in a matter-of-fact way how she went to meet a young man. They never search beneath their skins and on the whole tend to talk in brief and banal monosyllables. For example, this is how they react to the arrival of the philandering Gerry:

Kate How dare Mr Evans show his face here.

Maggie He wants to see his son, doesn't he?

Kate There's no welcome for that creature here.

Rose Who hid my Sunday shoes?

Maggie We'll have to give him his tea.

Kate I don't see why we should.

Maggie And there's nothing in the house.

Ordinary life is often full of small talk, but dramatic language on stage should be heightened to sound extraordinary in its seemingly ordinary manner. In another example, after Gerry dances with Agnes in Act Two, their dialogue limps along in the following staccato manner:

Gerry You're a great dancer, Aggie.

Agnes NO, I'm not.

Gerry You're a superb dancer.

Agnes NO, I'm not.

Gerry You should be a professional dancer.

Agnes Too late for that.

Gerry You could teach dancing in Ballybeg.

Agnes That's all they need.

Gerry Maybe it is!

Attempts by the aunts to reach for colourful imagery are limited to three trite similes and two trite metaphors in Act One. Chris says her hair looks "like a whinbush"; Rose mentions someone whose "trousers caught fire and he went up like a torch"; Maggie says one young fellow was "[b]ald as an egg." Maggie calls the judges at a dance contest "blind drunk"; Gerry wants to be believed by saying "Cross the old ticker." In Act Two there are two bland figures of speech: Maggie says of herself, "this chicken is weak with hunger"; and again it is Maggie who says Gerry and Father Jack in their fancy hats are "[s]trutting about like a pair of peacocks!"

Chicken and peacocks, that's all. And Friel's peacock image is innocuous, in contrast, for example, to O'Casey's sharply ironic exposure of a cheerfully vain and comically deceitful "paycock." An even more significant aspect of this contrast involves the way O'Casey—like Synge, Behan, and Beckett—takes a tragicomic double view of a character, giving him or her, a "Captain" Jack Boyle in Juno and the Paycock or a Bessie Burgess in The Plough and the Stars, contradictory or multiple traits: attractive and culpable, cowardly and wise, arrogant and courageous. And with shrewd variations, all these Irish dramatists share this dual and ironic approach to character with Chekhov, for it is also an outstanding technique in his dark comedies. Although Friel says he has a special affinity for Chekhov, little Chekhovian influence can be found in Dancing at Lughnasa, where his five aunts are such straight and non-ironic characters it would not be appropriate to suggest a parallel between the Five Sisters and Chekhov's Three Sisters, a play which Friel has actually translated. The Friel sisters, each in their own transparent and limited ways, are locked into such rigid and one-dimensional portraits that they are as predictable as they are superficially attractive. Only Father Jack reflects some uneasy and credible dualism as he struggles to cope with his convoluted and tragicomic acceptance of the wild African rituals, in contrast to his vanishing clerical Catholicism. On this point, Friel's complex characterization of Father Jack's African and Christian impulses is vastly more successful than the similar attempts to reconcile contradictory rituals in Wonderful Tennessee. Furthermore, in the New York production Father Jack was played so movingly and imaginatively by the very sensitive Donai Donnelly, with such a mixed air of mysterious sadness and bumbling bravado, that many palpable Chekhovian as well as Irish strokes of tragicomedy were clearly evident.

In an overall final view of the play, however, perhaps an embarrassing parallel to Thornton Wilder is more appropriate than a flattering comparison to Chekhov. Wilder's Our Town is also a sentimental memory-play that celebrates the simple good things of life through the use of a nostalgic narrator who glorifies everyday events in Graver's Corners, as Michael remembers and celebrates the simple good times in Ballybeg. Wilder' s Emily helps the Stage Manager by remembering things like "Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up." Friel's Michael looks back and remembers as the aunts act out their simple pleasures, singing songs and laughing, picking and eating bilberries, washing their hair, applauding when the "Marconi" performs, and above all letting go with the sheer joy of dancing. To be sure, there are sad deaths too in Grover's Corners, as there is the pathetic death of the two aunts from Ballybeg; but life goes on in both towns thanks to the glowing and sentimental memory of the Stage Manager and Michael. In both plays it is the memory of the ordinary happy times that endures. It is the memory of dancing not death that overwhelms Michael as he delivers his mesmerized curtain speech:

But there is one memory of that Lughnasa time that visits me most often [ … ] When I remember it, I think of it as dancing. Dancing with eyes half closed because to open them would break the spell. Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement [ … ] this wordless ceremony [ … ] Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary. (Slowly bring up the music. Slowly bring down the lights.)

Dancing conquers all? Why do I resist this sweet spell, this half-shut-eyed vision, this oversimplification of life and Lughnasa, life anywhere, in which a nostalgic memory of dancing makes words unnecessary, as the music rises and the lights fade? Why do I prefer my own memory of Synge who insisted that words on the stage must be "rich and copious"; why do I prefer my own memory of Yeats who from the beginning in one of his earliest poems assured us that "Words alone are certain good"?