Dancing At Lughnasa

By (author) Friel Brian
Short description/annotation:
A profound, luminous masterpiece by one of Ireland''s greatest playwrights.
Description:

A profound, luminous masterpiece by one of Ireland''s greatest playwrights.

This edition was published in 2023 with a beautifully redesigned text and cover, to coincide with the National Theatre'' revival.

It is 1936 and harvest time in County Donegal. In a house just outside the village of Ballybeg live the five adult Mundy sisters; their older brother, a missionary priest returned from Uganda; and the youngest sister''s seven-year-old son, Michael. Over the course of two days in the family''s life, Brian Friel evokes not only the interior world of a group of human beings trapped in their domestic situation, but the wider landscape - public and private, Christian and pagan - of which they are nonetheless a part.

''There is no doubting we are in the thrall of as masterly a dramatist as the theatre possesses.'' The Times

Biographical note:
Brian Friel (9 January 1929 - 2 October 2015) wrote thirty plays across six decades and is widely regarded as one of Ireland''s greatest dramatists. His plays include Molly Sweeney, Wonderful Tennessee, Dancing at Lughnasa, Making History, Translations, Faith Healer, The Freedom of the City and Philadelphia, Here I Come!
Promotional headline:
A profound, luminous masterpiece by one of Ireland''s greatest playwrights.
Review quote: previous edition:
A glorious modern classic . . . the cumulative punch it packs at the end as we realise the delicate transience of what Friel has just shown us is remarkable.
Review quote: previous edition:
A powerfully moving evocation of time, place and atmosphere . . . This play won Friel the Evening Standard Award for best play in 1991, and it still looks richly deserved.
Review quote: previous edition:
Brian Friel''s 1990 play is beautifully layered, its meditative gaze turned both inward, on the intimacies, suffering and fierce affection of a 1930s County Donegal family, and outward to the wider world and the realm of the mystical and spiritual . . . its enchantment has a singular flavour, the homespun in harmony with the rich and strange; it is about nothing less than the vast mystery of life.
Review quote: previous edition:
It is a glory, full of emotion and power . . . the play is about writing and memory just as much as it is about society and women, and Ireland. It is so full of richness that each viewing brings a different insight . . . a play that feels as fresh as the day it was written.
Review quote: previous edition:
If the great Irish dramatist has written anything warmer and wiser, I don''t know it . . . Friel has Chekhov''s talent, not just for bringing a blend of love, humour, nostalgia, realism and grief to a microcosm that feels macrocosmic, but for seeing people from outside as well as feeling them from inside.