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DANCING AT LUGHNASA    by Brian Friel
Was performed 1st & 2nd May 2012 with the following cast:

Michael, the narrator                     Bill Hunt
Kate, a school teacher                    Val Ruddle
Maggie, housekeeper                      June Pockett
Agnes, knitter                                Christine Brooker
Rose, knitter                                  Lin Churchill
Chris, Michael’s mother                 Kate Ruddle
Gerry, Michael’s father                  Graham Mewis
Jack, missionary priest                  Norman Cork

Director                    -                   Bill Hunt
Assistant Director      -                  Rob Bird
Stage Manager           -                  Gus Clayton
Sound                        -                  Peter Griffiths  
Lighting                     -                 John Stephenson

This is Brian Friel’s undisputed masterpiece. A play that mixes memory and desire, generous humour and piercing sadness. One moment you are laughing uproariously, the next your eyes are filled with stinging tears.
The action is set in the late summer of 1936, in the Donegal village of Ballybeg, the home of five spinster sisters. Money is tight. The only real breadwinner is the oldest sister, Kate, who teaches at the local school. Rose and Agnes earn a pittance knitting gloves, while the youngest sister, Chris, is the unmarried mother of a seven-year-old son, Michael, whose grown-up self acts as the play's narrator, looking back on the tumultuous summer in his childhood when everything changed for ever.
The play's title comes from a pagan Irish festival, celebrating the harvest, and the contrast between Catholicism and pagan ritual is a constant theme of the play. The sisters' older brother, Jack has recently returned from Africa where he served for a quarter of a century as a missionary priest in a leper colony. Far from converting the Africans, however, it is gradually and hilariously revealed that he went native and began to worship African gods.
And though they are good Catholic girls, the sisters have their pagan side too. In the play's most celebrated scene, they dance like mad whirling, stamping dervishes to Irish dance music coming out of their antique radio, a tumultuous celebration of life and wildness with more than a hint of chronic sexual frustration about it.

REVIEWS
This production received a lot of very complimentary feedback including two people who said it was better than professional productions they had seen in Birmingham and Bath.