Dancing at Lughnasa

Irish Catholicism, its rituals and rules and its resonances within the family and as well as the clashes it produces.  
Notes collected
The play is set in a small rural community in the north of Ireland in the early 20h century. The power of the Catholic religion is evident in this small community. There are also certain pagan practices mentioned such as the Festival of Lughnasa where a young boy was burned in a type of ritual. 
Just as the radio is a partly foreign and potentially corrupting influence in the Mundy cottage, so the homecoming of Father 
Jack brings with it alien and challenging ideas and behaviour. Jack, for years a source of great pride as Ballybeg’s ‘own leper priest’, has transgressed his role in Ryanga and ‘gone native’. He has come to accept and even embrace the traditional rituals and way of life which seem to work well for the Ryangan villagers. And within this acceptance is an implicit critique of the Catholic missionary model, an understanding that it would fail to meet the spiritual and emotional needs of the community of lepers. Elsewhere too Friel is interested in the failure of institutional Christianity to be a force for good in the lives of its followers. In Dancing at Lughnasa, Kate comes to reconcile her strict Catholic beliefs with her brother’s behaviour by classifying it as ‘his own distinctive search’. The rest of the community, however, is less forgiving. The local priest, who is also Kate’s employer, sacks her from her job as schoolteacher, ostensibly because of falling class sizes, but in reality as a punishment for Jack’s renegade behaviour. In doing so he plunges the entire Mundy household into deepening poverty.Father Jack’s Ugandan experiences are not the only source of paganism in the play. At Lughnasa time, the back hill locals of Ballybeg practice a ceremony involving dancing, fire, and animal sacrifice, just like Jack’s African rituals. Maire MacNeill’s book The Festival of Lughnasa explores Celtic and pre-Christian harvest rituals and how they continued in 

Ireland into modern times (see page 13 of this pack). While there is no evidence of goat sacrifice in the 20th century – as 

Rose dramatically describes – the practice of large groups gathered to sing and dance on hilltops is well documented. 

Yet in the 1920s and 30s – the early years of the new Irish Free State – even such seemingly innocent and traditionally 

Celtic activities came to be frowned upon by an increasingly conservative church and state, and would not long survive into 

the century. 

Christianity is strongly present in these stories, but sometimes sits alongside or is seen in conflict with traditional Celtic or 

pagan ways. The archive records the final decades of the old way of life in rural Ireland, before technology and industrialisation would 

change things forever.