August, 1936
The home of the Mundy family, two miles outside the village of Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland.
The room has the furnishings of the usual country kitchen of the thirties: a large iron range, large turf box beside it, table and chairs, dresser, oil lamp, buckets with water at the back door, etc., etc. But because this is the house of five women the austerity of the furnishings is relieved by some gracious touches – flowers, pretty curtains, and attractive dresser arrangement, etc. The garden is neat but not cultivated with a garden seat.
The kitchen, and the garden adjoining house.
Cards to Brian Friel from cast on opening night
It is an accepted belief that Ireland in the Thirties – and counties like Donegal in particular – was a grim and depressed place, a land without hope. And indeed even a casual knowledge of what we call the ‘economic climate’ of that time offers us a dispiriting picture. Emigration was bleeding the country. Money was scare.
The Mundy girls (they weren’t girls, of course; they were women; but girls was the language of the time) had no idea they lived in an economic climate of any kind. But they did experience deprivation and depression. They engage with life, all of life. They want to dance, both in defiance and in delight. They give the lie to the belief – the cliché, really – that Ireland in the Thirties was populated only by suppressed and sullen people.¹
KATE: Ballybeg’s off its head. I’m telling you. Everywhere you go – everyone you meet – it’s the one topic: Are you going to the harvest dance?
KATE: You work hard at your job. You try to keep the home together. You perform your duties as best you can – because you believe in responsibilities and obligations and good order. And then suddenly, suddenly you realize that hair cracks are appearing everywhere; that control is slipping away; that the whole thing is so fragile it can’t be held together much longer. It’s all about to collapse, Maggie.
ROSE: It was last Sunday week, the first night of the Festival of Lughnasa; and they were doing what they do every year up there in the back hills. First they light a bonfire beside a spring well. Then they dance round it. Then they drive their cattle through the flames to banish the devil out of them.
MICHAEL: When I remember it I think of it as dancing. Dancing with eyes and ears half closed because to open them would break the spell.
DEDICATION: In memory of those five brave Glenties women
CHRIS: There’s a new factory started up in Donegal Town. They make machine gloves more quickly there and far more cheaply.
GERRY: Last night in a bar in Sligo.
ROSE: And he wants to bring me up to the back hills next Sunday – up to Lough Anna.
MAGGIE: To a dance in Ardstraw
BRIAN FRIEL: It began very modestly about three years ago. I was at a play at the National Theatre [in London] with the playwright Thomas Kilroy. We walked across the Waterloo Bridge and up the Strand. It was about eleven-thirty at night, and there were homeless sleeping in the doorways. Tom said, ‘If you talked to those people, I’m sure many of them are Irish.’ And I said, ‘I had two aunts, who, I think, ended up something like that.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you write about that?’ So that’s how it began: backward.²
Census return of the McLoone family, Glenties, 1901 showing Brian’s mother Christina
BRIAN FRIEL: When I was a boy we always spent a portion of our summer holidays in my mother’s old home near the village of Glenties in County Donegal. I have memories of those holidays that are as pellucid, as intense, as if they happened last week. I remember in detail the shape of cups hanging in the scullery, the pattern of flags on the kitchen floor, every knot of wood on the wooden stairway, every door handle, every smell, the shape and texture of every tree around the place.³
An Mhuc Dhubh newsletter 1993; family postcard; drawings of The Laurels
Postcards from Uganda sent back home to his family in Glenties by Barney (Fr. Bernard MacLoone)
MICHAEL: Young man, narrator, also speaks the lines of the Boy, i.e. himself when he was seven.
KATE: Forty, schoolteacher
MAGGIE: Thirty-eight, housekeeper
AGNES: Thirty-five, knitter
ROSE: Thirty-two, knitter
CHRIS: Twenty-six, Michael’s mother
GERRY: Thirty-three, Michael’s father
JACK: Fifty-three, missionary priest
‘For over thirty-five years Rev. Father MacLoone had laboured in the Ugandan mission fields until failing health compelled him to relinquish a missionary career which carried out with great spiritual zeal and dauntless courage earned for him the proud title of Tirconaill’s Father Damien’.
QUOTES FROM THE PLAY
MICHAEL: My Uncle Jack came home from Africa for the first time ever. For twenty-five years he had worked in a leper colony there, in a remote village called Ryanga in Uganda….And now in his early fifties and in bad health he had come home to Ballybeg – as it turned out – to die.
MICHAEL: Once I had seen a photograph of him radiant and splendid in his officer’s uniform. It had fallen out of Aunt Kate’s prayer book.
Black and white photographs sent to his family back home at Christmas and Easter from and of Fr. Bernard Joseph MacLoone (1885 − 1950) in the Leper Colony in Nyenga, Uganda (on whom the character ‘Jack’ was based).
Abbey Theatre programme
BRIAN FRIEL: I think there’s a need for the pagan in life.4
EXTRACT: I had five maiden aunts and they doted on me. I was their only nephew, the child of their youngest sister, Christina… Every year on August 1st we went to Donegal to visit them. The journey itself was an adventure in a mad scarlet rail-bus which plunged along a narrow-gauge track pulling a dancing wagon of luggage behind it and emitted a throaty toot-toot now and again just for the sheer joy of it. It was a two-and-a half hour trip through hills and between mountains, past lakes and streams, between high banks glowing with sun-yellow whins and flat boglands of purple and brown and russet.
Produced by Noel Pearson, directed by Pat O’Connor and starring Meryl Streep, Catherine McCormack, Michael Gambon, Kathy Burke, Bríd Brennan, Sophie Thompson, Rhys Ifans and Darrell Johnston.
Letters between Meryl Streep and Brian Friel, with film cast photo during the filming of Dancing at Lughnasa in County Wicklow 1997. Newspaper cutting of Meryl Streep in Glenties during the film premier in 1998
Dancing at Lughnasa film premiere in Glenties, Co. Donegal. 24 September 1998
A selection of pages from Brian Friel’s hardback notebooks containing holograph notes and draft dialogue and typed manuscripts for Dancing at Lughnasa
✭ Postcard of Donegal, courtesy of Donegal County Museum
✭ Performance photographs and poster, with kind permission of An Grianán Theatre
✭ MS 37,106 /1 – 3 Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 24 April 1990 images (previews from 18 April): World premiere of Dancing at Lughnasa, directed by Patrick Mason and starring Gerard McSorley, Frances Tomelty, Anita Reeves, Bríd Brennan, Bríd Ní Neachtáin, Catherine Byrne, Paul Herzberg and Barry McGovern. Opening night good luck messages from cast and crew (including card in the shape of a kite made by Catherine Byrne. Theatre Ireland containing a feature on the play (Spring 1990)
✭ Census of Railway View 1901, Courtesy of Kate Drewitt
✭ Architectural Drawings of The Laurels by Duncan McLaren. Dedalus Architecture
✭ An Mhuc Dhubh, 1993, Foreword by Brian Friel, With kind assistance in photography and courtesy of Joseph Brennan
✭ MS 37,107 /4 Postcards addressed to Friel’s aunts Alice, Christina, Kate and Maggie MacLoone of Glenties, Co. Donegal, his uncle Bernard Joseph MacLoone (Fr. Barney) and his grandmother Sarah MacLoone, from friends and relatives (1904 − 1910, 53 items).
✭ MS 37,106 /1 – 3 black and white photographs of Fr. Bernard Joseph MacLoone (1885 − 1950) in the Leper Colony in Nyenga, Uganda (on whom the character ‘Jack’ was based). Both prints are inscribed by Fr. MacLoone to ‘Miss [R] [?] & all at home’ and ‘Susan Burke & all at home’ at Easter and Christmas 1939 (21 March & 2 Nov 1939, 2 items, c6 x 9cm each) (Fr. MacLoone was ordained in 1911, served as chaplain to the British Forces in East Africa during World War I, was given charge of the leper colony at Nyenga in Western Africa in 1931 and later served as a volunteer chaplain in Africa during the Second World War. He died in 1950, survived by his brother Cormick and five sisters − Kathleen, Margaret, ‘Mrs. P. Friel’, Rose and Agnes)
✭ The Mason’s Apron, reel / Margaret McNiff-Locke Instrumental Trio: Date created: 1930-06. Irish Traditional Music Archive 277431
✭ Dancing at Lughnasa film premiere in Glenties, Co. Donegal. 24 September 1998. Jackson Media
✭ Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), by Brian Friel in Brian Friel: Collected Plays 3, Gallery Press: Co. Meath, 2016
✭ A Man’s World (1962) in Selected Stories Gallery Press: County Meath 2017, p135
✭ 1Brian Friel notes from Programme An Grianán Theatre 2002, p.6-7
✭ ²&4Brian Friel, in Dancing at Lughnasa, Due on Broadway this Month, Brian Friel Celebrates Life’s Pagan Joys. John Lahr 1991 in Delaney, Paul (ed.) Brian Friel in Conversation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 2000, p 214
✭ ³Self-Portrait (1972) By Brian Friel, in Murray, Christopher (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews : 1964-1999. London: Faber& Faber, 1999. p38
✭ Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
✭ MS 37,104 /1- 7
Hardback notebooks containing holograph notes and draft dialogue, typed manuscripts
✭ MS L 41 Pages from The Derry Journal and The Ulster Herald on the death of the ‘wee Donegal priest’ Fr. Bernard Joseph MacLoone, at his sisters’ home The Laurels, Glenties. Also enlarged photographic reproduction of the page from The Derry Journal (10 July 1950, c43 x 61cm).
✭ II.i.20.d Film MS 37,113 /1 Correspondence and draft agreements relating to the proposed film version of Dancing at Lughnasa. Letters to and from Friel and Meryl Streep; colour photograph of the cast and crew on location in County Wicklow 1997
An Action of the County Donegal Heritage Plan
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