Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

Memories fade over the years, but my lasting impression of the original production of this 1990 Brian Friel play is ‘what’s all the fuss about?’. A slow Chekovian piece that seemed to me to go nowhere. Though Chekhov is still one of my problem playwrights, I seem to have grown into this play.

Like many of Friel’s works it’s set in Ballybeg in the north of Ireland. It’s 1936 and five unmarried sisters live together, scraping a living. Kate is the only one with a proper job, as a teacher, at least for now. She’s very much the mother figure. Rose and Agnes make gloves at home, though the onward march of mass manufacturing is about to catch up with them. Chrissie has a son Michael, now 7, out of wedlock, and Maggie keeps home for them all. It’s a picture of five women unfulfilled, making the best of what they’ve got. A simple life.

Uncle Jack has returned from his missionary work with lepers in Uganda having ‘gone native’, embracing local customs at the expense of his catholic faith, somewhat imbalanced, perhaps due to malaria. Michael’s dad Gerry makes one of his rare visits, though this time he seems keen to get closer to his son and Michael’s mother Chrissie. The festival of Lughnasa is in progress but their engagement with it is tenuous, by Kate in particular who as a devout catholic sees it as a pagan occasion. Jack’s state of mind improves and Gerry hangs around but life goes on unchanged. It’s very much a memory play, with the adult Michael acting as narrator, at one point telling us in detail how their lives will unfold.

Josie Rourke’s production is a slow burn, with more events narrated than acted out, but somehow it captivated me this time around, perhaps because the performances really are beautifully judged, with Siobhan McSweeney and Justine Mitchell in particular shining in roles unlike any I’ve seen them in before. Though the action happens in and around their small cottage, the expanse of the Olivier stage is used by designer Robert Jones to place it in the Irish landscape and open it up to be the story of a people as much as it is one family.