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  • Ominous Festivals, Ambivalent Nostalgia:Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa and Billy Roche's Amphibians
  • Martin W. Walsh

Two contemporary plays, Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and Billy Roche's Amphibians (1992, revised 1998) continue a longstanding practice among Irish dramatists of tapping into the rich heritage of folklore, folkways, and calendar performances. Both playwrights base their handling of the festivals portrayed on ethnographical materials, but each substantially reinvents their stage "traditions." In doing so, each author demonstrates a certain attraction to a pagan past, but ambiguously so. Friel and Roche value the liberating energies of archaic rituals vis-à-vis Irish small-town life, but both authors find the rituals they present to be at the same time dangerously transgressive. If this is nostalgia, it is a decidedly ambivalent form of longing for the past.

Dancing at Lughnasa has already achieved the status of a classic of Irish drama, with numerous international productions and awards, including a 1991 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, and a 1992 Tony Award for best play, as well as major motion picture treatment in 1998.1 An autobiographical memory play, the piece centers on the five Mundy sisters and their recently returned missionary brother who live at the edge of the small Donegal town of Ballybeg (Irish for "small town"). The fictional Ballybeg is a thinly disguised version of Friel's own home town of Glenties in the southwest portion of the county. Although Friel's play has occasioned a considerable body of criticism, the critical literature includes only slight discussion of the Feast of Lughnasa itself, and how it functions in the work.2 [End Page 127]

Michael Mundy, the alter ego of the playwright, begins the play by reminiscing on the summer of 1936 when he was seven. He introduces the festival of Lughnasa by means of the family's new-fangled wireless set:

And because it arrived as August was about to begin, my Aunt Maggie—she was the joker of the family—she suggested we give it a name. She wanted to call it Lugh after the old Celtic God of the Harvest. Because in the old days August the First was La Lughnasa, the feast day of the pagan god, Lugh; and the days and weeks of harvesting that followed were called the Festival of Lughnasa. But Aunt Kate—she was a national schoolteacher and a very proper woman—she said it would be sinful to christen an inanimate object with any kind of name, not to talk of a pagan god. So we just called it Marconi because that was the name emblazoned on the set.3

Here, Friel establishes one of his favorite themes: narrow, puritanical Irish Catholicism versus an older "paganism," loosely defined, which in this work is played out as well in the person of Father Jack who has succumbed to an African animistic spirituality after twenty-five years in Uganda.

One point where the story does not fit into a strictly autobiographical framework is the centrality of the ancient feast. For residents of Glenties and environs, Lá Lughnasa was just as foreign a notion as it was for the audiences in Dublin, London, or New York, who were absolutely dependent on this exposition by Michael. In Brian Friel in Conversation (2000), James Deling pole reports on these statements from residents of Friel's hometown:

"I never heard of the festival of Lughnasa inme life," says Dr Malchy McCloskey, at 77 one of the town's older residents. "And we wouldn't be dancing round fires or anything like that. Not in my time, or my mother's," adds Marie Clare O'Donnell, a supervisor in the town co-op.4

Friel, then, has to a large extent invented a festival for his theatrical environment. In a similar fashion he turns his own apparently normal missionary uncle, who was afflicted only by recurring malaria, Father Barney, into the addled apostate Father Jack.

But if the stage Lá Lughnasa is not part of the playwright's own living tradition, neither is it an invention out of whole cloth. Friel is a playwright who undertakes significant research for his works, having written plays on...

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