Slow-burner drama with powerful characters

DANCING AT LUGHNASA, Oldham Coliseum
THERE are times in all our lives when events and circumstances seem to come together and for a brief time, life is happy.

Brian Friel’s 1990 semi-autobiographical drama captures such a time in the life of seven-year-old Michael Evans, without the boy ever appearing on stage.

Born out of wedlock to Christina, the youngest of five sisters living in rural Donegal in the Thirties, Michael’s thoughts are voiced by his older self, looking back on the brief few months when his family was all together for the last time, and his father (played by Paul Westwood) was an irregular but welcome visitor. There has been a tendency for Irish plays to dazzle in recent years, but what marks out Friel’s work is the quiet way in which he builds very powerful characters and relationships within the family, around the harvest-time festival of Lughnasa, when spirits are high and the summer drawing to a close.

Oldest sister Kate (Victoria Carling) is a school mistress who runs the home and tends to treat the others like children. Agnes (Mairead Conneely) is the most spinster-ish, with a secret crush on Michael’s dreamer of a father, while Rose (Bronagh Taggart), slightly simple, has trouble discerning the truth of relationships outside the family. Maggie (Patricia Gannon), and Michael’s hope-driven mother (Siobhan O’Kelly), don’t bring money into the house but keep it clean, and Maggie is the family laughter-maker.

Into this stable but frustrated group drops brother Jack (Daragh O’Malley), a missionary back from years of good works in Africa. But his return is not an occasion for joy, for he has turned away from his faith and is now ill, weak and in disgrace.

As he recovers, relationships within the group change and as work becomes scarce the family begins to lose its balance. Friel’s metaphor stands for Ireland over the same period, a time of great social change.

This Original Theatre Company touring production (until Saturday) is as quietly unassuming as the play itself, and like it, grows in stature over its length.

Director Alastair Whatley (who also narrates, as the older Michael) concentrates on its heart, the relationships between the women, conjuring a wildly energetic dance scene — the play’s best-known sequence — with the help of beautifully-judged performances throughout.