[In the following excerpt, Andrews analyzes the "central image" of dancing in Dancing at Lughnasa.]

In Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), the device of the boy / narrator allows memory to control and dominate the stage. Friel's dramatisation of nostalgic memory owes a good deal to Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, another play which is concerned with the tension between romance and reality. But whatever international influences there may be in Dancing at Lughnasa (Chekhov's and Lorca's ghosts are present too), Friel's concerns remain distinctively Irish—exploring the disposition for dreaming and mythologising which, as Hugh the schoolmaster in Translations explained to the Englishman Yolland, is a peculiarly Irish phenomenon. Williams's narrator is called Tom Wingfield, his name associating him with flight, as Friel's narrator, Michael, is also associated with flight through his interest in kites. Like Tom Wingfield, Michael may have escaped from a household of crippled women, but finds that he is still haunted by dreams and memories of twenty-five years ago. Past and present are virtually co-existent. The play consists of a series of vividly remembered scenes, at the centre of which is the dancing, stimulated by 'a dream music that is both heard and imagined, that seems to be both itself and its own echo'. As Michael explains, 'what fascinates me about that memory is that it owes nothing to fact … atmosphere is more real than incident'. By including Michael as narrator, Friel emphasises the constructed conditions of life. Michael is exploring his own memory and he admits its arbitrary nature: 'memories offer themselves to me'. The structure of the play is therefore associative rather than strictly logical. Various sources of 'derangement' coalesce in Michael's mind: Father Jack's 'return', the 'voodoo' of the newly acquired wireless, his father's first visit. The opening tableau which is lit up, bit by bit, in the inner stage of Michael's mind, presents the principal characters and highlights a sharp visual contrast between the five dowdy Mundy sisters (modelled on Friel's aunts who lived near Glenties in Co. Donegal) and the two men—the two 'fathers'—in the play. Father Jack, the sisters' brother, is a missionary priest who has been repatriated from Africa by his superiors after twenty-five years. He is wearing the uniform of a British army officer chaplain—a 'magnificent and immaculate uniform of dazzling white; gold epaulettes and gold buttons, tropical hat, clerical collar, military cane … he is "resplendent", "magnificent". So resplendent that he looks almost comic opera'. Equally bizarre is Michael's father, Gerry, a Spanish Civil War veteran, 'wearing a spotless white tricorn hat with splendid white plumage'. In Michael's imagination, Father Jack and Gerry have acquired a large and luminous presence in his memory of the drab, female world in which he was brought up.

As in so many other of his plays, Friel starts off with a highly conventionalised and repressed community, in this case the family of five spinster sisters, the youngest of whom, Chris, has a seven year old son, Michael. The tragedy of the five sisters and their brother is that they have lost touch with their deepest emotions. They are, to use a musical metaphor, out of tune with themselves. The play is highly reminiscent of Lorca's study of the tragic consequences of subordinating instinct to social codes or material interests in The House of Bernarda Alba (1945). In this, Lorca's last play, dealing with the sexual and political repression of women in the villages of pre-Civil War Spain, he dramatises the bitter domestic infighting between five sisters and their domineering mother, watched over by their critical maid. The piece is, amongst other things, an eloquent attack on the old order. Lorca, like Friel, wanted to reform the theatre as well as society, combining the illusion of reality with an interest in poetic myth, fusing traditional and popular elements with original and cultured ones. Over Lorca's drama, as over Friel's, there broods a similar sense of tragic fate, the question of how far the characters are victims of dark, irrational forces, how far of a more prosaic and realistic determinism in the form of local custom and convention.

Friel's play is set in 1936, in the months when De Valera was drawing up his Catholic Constitution for a Catholic people. 'Will you vote for De Valera, will you vote?' sings Maggie to Rose's song about Abyssinia. These women are the victims of an oppressively Catholic ethos, shortly to be enshrined in a Constitution which recognised 'the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society' and 'the special position of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of its citizens'. Responding to a demand in the country at the time for traditional Catholic social teaching in matters of marriage and family law, the Free State outlawed divorce, contraception and abortion. De Valera's programme, writes Robert Kee [in Ireland: A History, 1982], was characterised by a 'homely narrowness' and 'pious dogmatism':

Conservative in social and economic outlook, paying limited attention to problems such as housing, slum clearance and social welfare in general, safely—some would say smugly—steeped in the orthodox moral and social teachings of the Catholic Church of that day, it offered little in the way of inspiration to the young. Emigration, so long held by nationalists to have been one of the evils of English rule and to have been caused by the lack of freedom, continued. A strict literary censorship banned at different times almost all the best moden writers, including Irish ones.

Terence Brown [in Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985, 1985] refers to 'an almost Stalinist antagonism to modernism, to surrealism, free verse, symbolism and the modern cinema', which combined with 'prudery (the 1930s saw opposition to paintings of nudes being exhibited in the National Gallery in Dublin) and a deep reverence for the Irish past'. Summarising the attitude of Irish writers of the 1930s and 1940s, Brown continues:

Instead of de Valera's Gaelic Eden, the writers revealed a mediocre, dishevelled, often neurotic and depressed petit-bourgeois society that atrophied for want of a liberating idea. O'Faolain's image for it, as it was James Joyce's before him, is the entire landscape of Ireland shrouded in snow: 'under that white shroud, covering the whole of Ireland, life was lying broken and hardly breathing.'

The repressive Catholic ethos may have helped to consolidate a sense of identity, but it certainly left little room either for modernism and cosmopolitan standards or for the instinctual needs of ordinary people or for the least remnants of 'pagan' tradition.

Kate, the eldest of the sisters in the play, is a teacher and the only wage-earner. Chris and Maggie have no income, while Agnes and Rose, who is 'simple', make a little money knitting gloves at home. Their clothes 'reflect their mean circumstances': Rose wears Wellingtons; Maggie has large boots; Rose, Maggie and Agnes all wear overalls or large aprons. But vestiges of their femininity still shine through: the austerity of the furnishings is relieved by 'some gracious touches'—flowers, pretty curtains, an attractive dresser arrangement. The sisters are painfully aware that life is passing them by and that they are trapped in deadening routines from which no escape seems possible. Like Chekhov's three sisters dreaming of their 'Moscow', the Mundys are filled with an intense longing for a fuller life. Maggie speaks enviously of an old schoolfriend, the still 'bubbly, laughing, happy' Bernie O'Donnell who is now married to a Swede and is the mother of twins. Friel's elaborate texturing of the drama amplifies the basic condition of the sisters' lives. The exotic menu featuring 'Eggs Ballybeg' which Maggie conjures up is an amusing expression of the longing for something different from the usual fare and is reminiscent of the way Gar O'Donnell mocks S. B.'s dull routines by picturing his father in such exotic roles as that of fashion model or FBI spy. For Maggie, the ultimate delight is 'one magnificent Wild Woodbine'. Smoking the cigarette would seem to be the only 'wildness' available to these sadly wasted lives: 'Wonderful Wild Woodbine. Next best thing to a wonderful, wild man'. Any man at all, Maggie says, would do her, adding, 'God, I really am getting desperate'. The note of discontent is sounded in Chris's opening line: 'When are we going to get a decent mirror to see ourselves in?' which recalls Christy Mahon's complaint against 'the divil's own mirror we had beyond, would twist a squint across an angel's brow'. Chris's call for change, for clearer self-awareness, a more truthful self-image, is immediately countered by Maggie who refuses to entertain the thought of discarding the old mirror for fear of incurring seven years' bad luck. Thus, Maggie reveals her own superstitious attachment to the status quo. Chris's longing for escape from routine controls is further demonstrated when she says that she 'just might start wearing lipstick'. Agnes is the one this time who insists on the limits of freedom, reminding Chris of the form Kate's withering disapproval would take: '"Do you want to make a pagan of yourself?"'. The characteristic pattern is established: tidal surges of desire welling up within one or other of the sisters which are constantly checked or diffused, sometimes good-humouredly or wittily, sometimes bitingly, sometimes sadly.

Kate is clearly the head of the family and, like Judith in Aristocrats or Manus in The Gentle Island who preside over their respective families, she is constantly and acutely aware that she is facing a crisis, the challenge of having to adapt to change—Rose's awakened sexuality, the loss of jobs and income, Jack's breakdown, eventually Rose and Agnes's sudden desertion of the family to go and live in England. More than anything, Kate fears the imminent disintegration of the family:

You try to keep the home together. You perform your duties as best you can—because you believe in responsibilities and obligations and good order. And then suddenly, suddenly you realise that hair cracks are appearing everywhere; that control is slipping away; that the whole thing is so fragile it can't be held together much longer. It's all about to collapse.

Kate objects to levity, playfulness and novelty for they are threats to her fragile order. The hair cracks, we recognise early on, are caused not just by external forces over which the sisters have no control, but by equally unruly forces within the family itself, within consciousness (even Kate's). The greater the effort of repression, it would seem, the stronger the insurrectionary pressures. The great merit of the play is the unmistakeable tension which we feel between the very human desire for order and stability and the equally strong desire for excitement and new experience. This tension has various forms. On one level, it is a struggle between Christianity and paganism, on another, it is the challenge offered to civilised value by an irruption of repressed libidinal energy, at yet another, it is the harrassment of the symbolic order of 'ordinary' language and fixed structure by a semiotic force outside language which disrupts all stable meanings and institutions.

Dancing is the play's central image for a contravention and violation of 'normal' reality. It is Friel's new expression of the secret life which before he had represented verbally (in the character of, say, Private Gar) but which we know in actuality never formulates itself in words, even in the mind. The dancing is the play's chief 'opening' activity which is disturbing because it represents a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the usual routine, a ritualised suspension of everyday law and order. In the repressive climate of the 1930s, dancing was regarded with some suspicion as representing a species of moral decadence and a threat to the morals of the nation's youth. These puritanical attitudes were reflected in the Public Dancehalls' Act of 1953 which required licensing of dance-halls. This pleased rural businessmen and the clergy for it did away with open-air dancing at crossroads and dances held in private houses. But it was a measure which contributed to the dying out of many traditional customs, though ironically the government which enacted it was officially pledged to a revival of Irish folklore and Irish traditional music and dancing.

When Agnes suggests that the sisters all go to the harvest dance, Rose quickly launches into 'a bizarre and abandoned dance' while Kate 'panics'. The word is derived from 'Pan,' the personification of deity displayed in creation and pervading all things. Pan was the god of flocks and herds, of the woods and all material substances. Part goat, part man, he was renowned for his lustful nature. In reacting to the dancing as she does, Kate is reacting to the id, to the assertion of the spermatic principle, the free imagination, the buried impulse. She represents the repressive force of Christianity inhibiting full and free embracement of this primitive, pagan, secret life of Pan. 'Just look at yourselves!' she shouts at her sisters, 'Dancing at your time of day. That's for young people with no duties and no responsibilities and nothing in their heads but pleasure'. In Kate's eyes, dancing is 'pagan', associated with a kind of sexual freedom which contravenes her strict Catholicism: 'Mature women dancing? What's come over you all? And this is Father Jack's home—we must never forget that'.

Later, when Irish dance music comes over the radio, Kate's remonstrations are ignored by all the other sisters who, one by one, succumb to the music's strange enchantment. Friel comments that 'there is a sense of order being consciously subverted'. Their dancing, as Julia Cruickshank notes, is both an expression of individual identity and an affirmation of collectivity, the five sisters dancing as a family but still preserving their own distinctive personalities. Maggie's features 'become animated by a look of defiance' and she emits 'a wild, raucous "Yaaaah!" ' She draws her flour-covered hand down her cheek, patterning her face 'with an instant mask'. Described as a 'white-faced, frantic dervish', she is associated with the Ryangan natives amongst whom Father Jack has lived and who paint their faces with coloured powders and then 'dance—and dance—children, men, women, most of them lepers, many of them with misshapen limbs, with missing limbs'. Similarly, the Mundy sisters find momentary release from harsh reality in the ecstasy of the dance. Maggie is joined by a transfigured Rose, Agnes and Chris. Agnes moves 'gracefully, most sensuously' while Rose dances wildly, her 'Wellingtons pounding out their own erratic rhythm'. Eventually, even Kate, who has been watching the scene with unease, suddenly leaps to her feet, flings her head back, and utters a loud 'Yaaaah!' Kate, the most repressed of the sisters, dances alone. Her dancing, we are told, is 'ominous of some deep and true emotion', but it is 'totally concentrated, totally private'. When the music stops, the sisters self-consciously and awkwardly recollect themselves, and the old routines are resumed.

Dancing would seem to be the expression of a distinctively female sexual energy which eludes a patriarchal, linguistic order:

Gerry: DO you know the words?
Chris: I never know the words.
Gerry: Neither do I. Doesn't matter. This is more
 important.

Gerry recognizes a natural subversiveness in femininity. He speaks of a difference between men's constant need for order and purpose in life and women's greater readiness to live without fixed division: 'Maybe that's the important thing for a man: a named destination—democracy, Ballybeg, heaven. Women's illusions aren't so easily satisfied—they make better drifters'. Gerry of course is a dancer too, but he's an exponent of ballroom dancing, a respectable, 'civilized' form of dancing which demonstrates the triumph of order and control. By contrast, the sisters' dancing is a regression to unchoreographed instinct, the unleashing of primitive, even savage, feeling. When Gerry dances, it is to 'Dancing in the Dark', a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rodgers kind of number: when the sisters dance together, it is to 'The Mason's Apron" … very fast; very heavy beat; a raucous sound', and they are transformed 'into shrieking strangers' and 'white-faced, frantic dervishes'. In earlier plays we glimpse this notion of a fragile yet transgressive femininity. In Philadelphia and Aristocrats, it is set against the presence of a rigid, authoritarian father figure who inhibits free emotional expression. In both these earlier plays, the mother is a shadowy influence, symbolic of the free spirit that cannot ever be entirely extinguished. In Philadelphia she is 'small … and wild and young … and her eyes were bright and her hair was loose' ; in Aristocrats she was 'absorbed into the great silence'. In Freedom of the City she is irrepressible Lily, whose inchoate, potentially subversive, vital, female energy declares itself within and against the imposed (male) ideological and linguistic structures symbolised by Derry's Guildhall.

Dancing has healing power. In Act 1, Maggie, after recalling painful memories of Brian McGuinness, a man whom she once was 'keen on' but lost to an old schoolfriend, finds consolation and emotional release in the impromptu dance with her sisters which she initiates. Chris's dance with Gerry is what makes his leaving bearable: 'Just dance me down the lane and then you'll leave'. This ritual of healing can be a communal experience. Jack describes 'children, men, women, most of them lepers, many of them with misshappen limbs—dancing, believe it or not, for days on end!' Rose is transformed by her sexual experience in the 'back hills', amongst the dying embers of the Lughnasa fires: 'Indeed, had we not seen the Rose of Act 1, we might not now be immediately aware of her disability'.

The pagan connotations of the sisters' dancing is emphasised by relating it to the dancing which is a part of the festival of Lughnasa taking place in the 'back hills'. The play, that is, concerns itself with the collective as well as personal memory. Just as the sisters' dancing expresses their individual private feelings so the dancing in the 'back hills' is the manifestation of a hidden, submerged culture which neither colonial influence nor Christian teaching has been able to extinguish. When Maggie and Rose first break into song—the appropriately exotic 'Abyssinia' song—and dance around the kitchen, Agnes's comments again playfully echo Kate: 'A right pair of pagans the two of you'. Rumours of what has been going on at the Lughnasa festivities infiltrate the Mundy household. Kate, the guardian of Christian value, is appalled when she hears the story of how a local boy has been badly injured when, during the drinking and dancing, he fell into the bonfire. Young Sweeney becomes her prime example of the dire consequences of yielding to 'pagan' and dissolute impulses and letting slip the properties of civilised order. The boy's name links him with the ancient Irish archetype of pagan disobedience and impiety, the legendary Sweeney who defied the Christian authorities and was punished by being condemned to fly around like a bird for the rest of his life. Young Sweeney is a denizen of the 'back hills', the pagus, the wilderness beyond the bounds of civilisation. It is to these same 'back hills' that the sinister Danny Bradley later takes Rose courting. Kate claims to know the people who live there: 'And they're savages! I know those people from the back hills! I've taught them! Savages—that's what they are!'

Any good reference work on Irish myth and legend will provide information about the meaning and origins of 'Lughnasa'. It was one of the four major pre-Christian, Celtic festivals, the others being Oimelc, Samhain and Beltaine. Basically a harvest festival, Lughnasa was celebrated for fifteen days in honour of the god Lugh, one of the most important Irish gods. In Peter Berresford Ellis' A Dictionary of Irish Mythology we find that Lugh, cognate with Welsh Lleu and Gaulish Lugos, was a sun god, known for the splendour of his countenance, and god of all arts and crafts. Over the years this mighty god's image diminished in popular folk memory until he was simply known as 'Lugh-chromain', which became Anglicised as Leprechaun. However, as Ellis points out, his name still survives in the place-names of many lands, not just Ireland: Lyons, Leon, Loudan and Laon in France, Leiden in Holland, Liegnitz in Silesia and Carlisle (Luguvalum in Roman times) in England as well as London which, like Lyons, was named the 'fortress of Lugh'—Lugdunum, hence the Latin Londinium. Egerton Sykes, compiler of Everyman's Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology, further informs us of how Christianity took Lugh's feast over as Lammas, the feast of first fruits, which is now commemorated by the August Bank Holiday. The name 'Lugh' survives in modern Irish in 'Lughnasad', the month of August. The element nasad in the name of the festival relates to words signifying 'to give in marriage' and Maria Leach, in the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend, records a story of the festival of Lughnasad honouring the marriage of Lugh to the Sovranty of Ireland, a monstrous hag who was transformed into a radiant beauty. The hag—Ireland—was transformed by the caresses of the sun from the bleakness of winter into the floral splendour of spring—a version of the widespread myth of the union of sun and earth. Thus, Lughnasa is traditionally associated with sexual awakening, rebirth, continuance and it is significant that the date, 1 August, is exactly nine months, the normal period of gestation, before the great feast of Beltaine which celebrated the beginning of summer. These motifs of sexual awakening and magical transformation are central to Friel's play.

Friel's paganism links him with Synge who was also interested in exploring the possibility of Dionysiac comedy in which the instincts are given free expression. Synge, we may recall, revolted against the realism of Ibsen and Zola who dealt with 'the reality of life in joyless and pallid words' [J. M. Synge, Preface to The Playboy of the Western World, 1907]. Instead, Synge wanted 'the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality', an 'imagination that is fiery and magnificent and tender'. He found this kind of imagination amongst the peasants of the west of Ireland. His distinctive 'Western World' is fantastic, romantic, both brutal and sentimental, both pagan and Catholic and, also like Friel's fictional world, one which oscillates between the mystery of poetic vision and the brutal realities of living, between dream and reality. But where Synge sought to replace the 'joyless and pallid' words of the realist with a language that was 'richly flavoured as a nut or apple', Friel goes outside the native tradition of verbal theatre altogether, seeking to evolve new, non-rational forms through his experiments with pagan ceremony, music and a new wordless language of the body. Friel's transformations are only momentary, but they have a communal dimension which Synge's do not have. Where Synge dramatises a form of personal heroics, the achievement of the special individual, Friel's dancing at Lughnasa is much more democratic, being both an individual and a collective activity.

The dancing in the play is associated not only with the pagan festival of Lughnasa but also with African tribal rituals. As Cruickshank observes, the Celtic and Ryangan worlds are both small, neglected communities on the fringes of civilisation; both are ex-colonies, both are cultures rich in dance and ritual. Jack admires the Ryangan 'capacity for fun, for laughing, for practical jokes—they've such open hearts! In some respect they're not unlike us'. And so, like the Sweeney boy, Jack has 'gone native', attracted by ancient ritual and wordless ceremony. Jack's lapse from Christian orthodoxy is synonymous with his loss of language ('My vocabulary has deserted me'), the primary tool of the rational western mind. What Jack particularly values in Ryangan culture is the fact that there is 'no distinction between the secular and the religious'. The Ryangans allow the spiritual and the sensual to interpenetrate each other: 'almost imperceptibly the religious ceremony ends and the community celebration takes over'. Ryangan primitivism emphasises both the sensuous and the communal life. In Ryanga 'women are eager to have love children', Jack informs a horrified Kate who earlier, we may recall, sought to discourage Chris's participation in the festival dance by reminding her of her maternal role: 'You have a seven-year-old child. Have you forgotten that?' Like Father Chris, the returned missioner in the early play, The Blind Mice, Jack is forced to reassess conventional piety in the light of his experience of the 'alien' and the 'Other'. Repatriated to Ballybeg, he seeks to create a new, more congenial 'home' for himself than the one he has inherited. Michael remembers him as 'a forlorn figure … shuffling from room to room as if he were searching for something but couldn't remember what'.

The other rogue 'father' in the play is Gerry. He would seem to be descended from that earlier playboy-dancer-musical engineer, the insouciant Shane in The Gentle Island. Like Shane, Gerry brings music and dancing to a depressed, inward-turned family. Both are musical repair men: Gerry repairs the sisters' radio, Shane fixes up the old record player on the island. Like Shane also, Gerry is a dangerously disruptive influence who acts as a catalyst for many of the tensions that exist between the members of the family, especially when he shifts his attentions from Chris to Agnes at the end. He represents the intrusion of a kind of virile manliness into a predominantly female, celibate world. His presence awakens the sisters' repressed sexuality: seeing him approach the house, they all begin to prettify themselves in front of the mirror and watch his every move from the garden window with entranced curiosity. Gerry is an urban outsider (he speaks with an English accent) to the small, parochial world of the sisters, as much of a mystery man to the sisters as Synge's playboy was to the simple Mayo folk. Like Christy, Gerry offers to a repressed community the opportunity of release from routine, the experience of romance. For all his gift of the gab, he is the play's chief sponsor of 'wordless ceremony', the one who carries Chris and, later, Agnes, beyond words: 'Don't talk. … Not a word', he counsels, as he dances Chris across the garden. But his negative qualities are also clearly recognised—his irresponsibility and unreliability. Chris knows not to be taken in by him. She is realistic enough to see that however attractive her playboy may be, he is not to be trusted with her heart: 'Don't talk any more; no more words', she says to him, 'Just dance me down the lane and then you'll leave'. At the end, Michael finds out that even while Gerry was proposing to Chris, he already had a wife and son in England.

Not surprisingly, Kate is the most hostile critic of the jaunty, smiling, Gerry, the man who defies any easy categorisation and threatens confusion and disruption to her careful order. He has, she says, 'no business at all coming here and upsetting everybody' and she preserves a chilly detachment, insisting on calling him 'Mr Evans'. She objects to him because 'he has no sense of ordinary duty', he has run out on Chris and Michael. Kate even calls him a 'beast', for with Gerry she is forced to confront the reality of the body. Slipping the leash of family responsibility, Gerry shows himself to be a shiftless, rootless individual with no secure sense of home or personal identity. Since leaving Chris, he has been a dancing instructor and is now a gramophone salesman and prospective international adventurer. Later, we hear that he became a 'dispatch rider' in the Spanish Civil War, a fitting symbolic role for this restless individual whose function throughout the play is to facilitate the opening up of secret communications in and between the embattled sisters. Kate, the bastion of orthodox Christian value, reacts predictably to the news of Gerry's latest adventure, criticising all young Irishmen who go to Spain 'to fight for godless communism' . Gerry, with his stories of cows with one horn, and his talk of 'fabulous omens' and 'bad omens' is another of the play's essentially pagan spirits.

However, Kate's attitude to Gerry is as ambivalent as her attitude to Jack. She is constrained to admit that Chris is transfigured in Gerry's company: 'And look at her, the fool. For God's sake would you look at that fool of a woman. (Pause) Her whole face alters when she's happy, doesn't it? (Pause) They dance so well together. They're such a beautiful couple'. And, despite her fears of Gerry's sinister influence, she relents and tells Chris: 'Of course ask him in. And give the creature his tea. And stay the night if he wants to. (Firm again) But in the outside loft. And alone'. Kate's speech summarises the tension in her between the desire for order and her natural womanly feeling.

In the play, dancing signifies a freeing of human behaviour from predetermining norms and motivations and an attunement of the individual to his or her deepest impulses, to the rest of the group and, ultimately, to the cosmic forces symbolically (and actually) transmitted through the music on the radio, 'Marconi's voodoo'. It is Gerry to whom the sisters turn when their radio keeps breaking down. He is the one who tries to fix their aerial so that they can tune in again to the 'dream music'. He is their link with the 'Other', with the world beyond their usual, stifling routines. He leads them out of themselves and helps them to discover the submerged parts of their own being. Not only is he a professional dancer, he is also one of the birdmen of the play, one of those adept at flying. Aloft in the sycamore tree tinkering with the radio aerial, he sways and sings, '"He flies through the air with the greatest of ease. … That daring young man on the flying trapeze"', while down below Agnes covers her eyes in terror, unable to watch the daredevilry of the dashing risk-taker, the 'clown' amongst the branches. Gerry is linked with the ancient Sweeney and, by extension, with the young pagan celebrant from the 'back hills'. He is also linked with the boy Michael, another 'flyer', who throughout the play is engaged in making and trying to fly two kites. Michael's kites are decorated with grotesquely painted, savage faces, which recall the painted faces of Jack's Ryangan dancers. In the complex web of parallels and correspondences which we find in the play, there is a connection between flying, dancing and pagan ceremonial. All of these activities are forms of release from the tyranny of routine and the pressure of the fact. Recalling earlier 'flying' motifs—Cass's 'winged armchair' or Manus's 'airplane seat'—we remain uncomfortably aware that flying can all too easily become mere avoidance, delusion, escapism.

The play might seem to dramatise a gradual contraction of possibility, a gradual disintegration of the existing order. 'Lughnasa's almost over, girls. There aren't going to be many warm evenings left', says Maggie, perceiving an end to the season of adventure and experiment. Rose's rooster, which has been associated with an exotic primitive ceremonialism, has been destroyed by the fox. Maggie's riddling wit, which so enlivened her exchanges with young Michael, at last fails her: 'I've a riddle for you. Why is a gramophone like a parrot? … Because it … because it always … because a parrot … God, I've forgotten'. As with Jack earlier, words let her down, but not as a necessary stage in the revitalisation or reordering of communicational structures. What Kate has always feared actually happens—the family breaks up. Agnes and Rose leave and when Michael catches up with them twenty-five years later, he finds that Agnes is dead and Rose is dying in a hospice for the destitute in Southwark. Dreamy Agnes and 'simple' Rose cannot survive outside the security of the family. Life in Ballybeg seemed to offer them less and less, but flight has not brought happiness nor fulfilment either. Michael rehearses the details of their sad end: how they moved about a lot, worked as cleaners of public toilets, factories, in the Underground; how there came a time when Rose could no longer find work and Agnes couldn't support the two of them. 'They gave up'. They took to drink and slept in parks, in doorways, on the Thames Embankment. Agnes died of exposure. Jack dies within a year of the events of the play 'and with him and Agnes and Rose all gone the heart seemed to go out of the house'. Maggie took on the tasks Rose and Agnes had done and 'pretended to believe that nothing had changed'. Chris spent the rest of her life in the knitting factory, hating every day of it. Kate's end is no happier: she has to take a job tutoring the children of Austin Morgan, the man whom she had once had 'a notion of.

The play would seem to emphasise lost opportunities, tragic waste, failure, a gradually diminishing life. And yet the feeling one is left with is not at all as simple as that. The play doesn't end with the narrator's blunt account of the ultimately tragic ends of the characters. Even knowing the destiny of his aunts, Michael remains 'fascinated' by the hypnotic, magical power of memory. 'The stage is lit in a very soft, golden light so that the tableau we see is almost, but not quite, in a haze'. This is the space somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet. Life retains its aura of enchantment. The play refuses pessimism. Unlike Maggie, Michael is conscious of change—change for good as well as bad. He acknowledges the sordid deaths of Agnes and Rose, but also registers the survival of young Sweeney. In the closing tableau, 'the characters are now in positions similar to their positions at the beginning of the play—with some changes'. Michael's kites may never have flown in the course of the play, but they are still 'boldly' displayed, the savage faces on them 'grinning' defiantly. One of the kites stands between Gerry and Agnes, the other between Agnes and Jack, for the failure of Agnes's flight has to be balanced by the perpetually buoyant quality of Gerry's life and the freedom which Jack discovered. As Michael begins his final speech, Friel directs that the music—'It is Time to Say Goodnight'—should be 'just audible' in the background. 'Everybody sways very slightly from side to side—even the grinning kites. The movement is so minimal that we cannot be quite certain if it is happening or if we imagine it'. Like memory, our experience of the play itself is ambivalent. The liminal movement and sound act to undermine our sense of a solid, fixed reality. We are put in the position of Private Gar who, thinking of his childhood fishing trip with his father, 'wonders now did it really take place or did he imagine it'. Friel explores that space between objective fact and subjective imagining, that 'limbo' in which, as Michael puts it, 'everything is simultaneously actual and illusory'. Michael's final speech powerfully asserts a ghostly presence, an 'atmosphere … more real than incident', 'a mirage of sound—a dream music'—which mesmerically leads people out of themselves, even out of the prison-house of language. The play ends with Michael's vivid memory of 'dancing as if language had surrendered to movement—as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness'. In his opening speech of the play, Michael speaks of a rite of passage, indicating how, on one level, this is a play about growing up, about the transition from innocence to experience: 'I had a sense of unease, some awareness of a widening breach between what seemed to be and what was'. The stability and solidity of his childhood world have been disturbed: 'That may have been because Uncle Jack hadn't turned out at all like the resplendent figure in my head. Or maybe because I had witnessed Marconi's voodoo derange those kind, sensible women and transform them into shrieking strangers'. He comes to recognise a deep mystery in life. He has seen frustration, breakup, unbearable drudgery, failure, but he also becomes aware of a force for change which, though it may threaten the 'safe' world of childhood, is also the ground of hope and aspiration. His final tableau rearranges the opening one and the most abiding memory he is left with is of 'atmosphere', of 'dream music', 'dancing'—of a mysterious libidinal energy. The significance of this intuitive, illogical, level of experience is finally articulated verbally, in Michael's powerful, lyrical closing narration.

The play enacts an ideal balance—between narration and enactment, the rational and the irrational, language and music, the religious and the secular, past and present. To live in one sphere alone is inadequate. As Julia Cruickshank observes, Rose may be the one 'not educated out of her emotions', but she perishes away from the security of the family. On the other hand, Kate, the one most alarmed by instinct and irrationality, makes a strenuous effort to adapt and come to terms with Jack's 'nativism'.

Michael can't help but be amused by her valiant struggle to accept. 'Startled', 'stunned' and 'shocked' as Kate is by the change in Jack, 'finally she hit on a phrase that appeased her: "his own distinctive spiritual search", "Leaping around a fire and offering a little hen to Uka or Ito or whoever is not religion as I was taught it and indeed know it," she would say with a defiant toss of her head. "But then Jack must make his own distinctive search'". Ballybeg, too, is faced with the challenge of adapting to change in the form of the knitting factory. As in Translations, the community's survival depends on its ability to move with the times. Frank Rich, the influential—even feared—New York Times critic, commenting on the success of the Abbey Theatre production of the play at Broadway's Plymouth Theatre in October 1991, concluded his review [25 October 1991] with these words of appreciation of Friel's complex vision:

Even knowing that he (Michael) knows and what everyone knows about life's inevitable end, he clings to his vision of his childhood, a golden end-of-summer landscape in the production's gorgeous design, for what other antidote than illusions is there to that inescapable final sadness? Dancing at Lughnasa does not dilute that sadness—the mean, cold facts of reality, finally, are what its words are for. But first this play does exactly what theatre was born to do, carrying both its characters and audience aloft on those waves of distant music and ecstatic release that, in defiance of all language and logic, let us dance and dream just before night must fall.

If in Faith Healer Friel takes us to the very edge of the postmodern Apocalypse, in Dancing at Lughnasa he recollects himself to affirm the vitality and dialogue of individual experience even when we are aware of what the future holds. Just as Chris's and Agnes's dancing is not simply socialised as Gerry's is, their story is not merely a chronicling of events. Like Father Jack's spirituality which cannot be held by the words of the Mass, it is fluid. The ultimate image of Friel's drama is of a space where 'language surrendered to movement'. The almost imperceptible fluidity of the play's closing tableau is a celebration of the power of theatre to renew and reveal, and a rejection of 'fossilised' history.