Theatre review: Dancing at Lughnasa

Published on Thursday 21 April 2011 19:53

DANCING AT LUGHNASA CITIZENS' THEATRE, GLASGOW ***

THE news that Dominic Hill has been appointed as the new artistic director of the Citizens' Theatre has been widely welcomed, given his strong track-record at Dundee Rep and the Traverse. And one of his first jobs, when he arrives in Glasgow in October, should be to make sure that this fabulous theatre has more exciting material to fill its main stage than this respectable but routine touring production of Brian Friel's great 1990 play, presented by the Bury St Edmunds-based Original Theatre Company.

Set in Donegal in the summer of 1936 – when Friel himself would have been a child of seven – Dancing At Lughnasa captures a moment in the lives of five sisters living on their family's smallholding, while social forces far beyond their control begin to destroy their familiar world. To Michael, the seven-year-old son of the youngest sister Chrissie, the summer seems like something of an idyll, as his adult self looks back at it.

It's Friel's genius to create a play which also embodies a huge, looming sense of the pressures that make change inevitable: from the new radio on the sideboard singing out seductive love songs and jazz riffs, to the fragility of a harsh Catholicism which can hardly compete any longer with the pagan vitality and wisdom of older pre-Christian traditions.

Alastair Whatley's decent production goes some way towards representing all this, without ever seeming to feel it in the blood. The Donegal accents are uncertain, the style a shade anaemic. And although Victoria Carling gives a vehement and deeply human performance as eldest sister Kate, and Daragh O'Malley is subtly unhinged as the family's disgraced priest brother, Father Jack, the rest of the acting is somehow forgettable, in a mighty play that needs to be staged with less elegiac gentleness, and more anger, energy and flair.