Killybegs students present Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa

Starlight at St Catherine’s Vocational School are staging Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa this week. 

The young cast are delivering a mature performance of this iconic play which is deeply rooted in rural Donegal. 

The play runs in St Catherine’s Vocational School at 8pm nightly until November 29. Tickets cost €10/€7 and are available from the cast and at the door. 

The cast are: Kate - Ellie Cassidy Battles, Maggie - Zara Dorrian, Rose - Karen McCrudden / Niamh Gallagher, Agnes - Lauren Blaine, Chris - Eve Boyle, Michael - Brian Callaghan, Gerry - Shay Rowan, Jack - Conor Gallagher

About Dancing at Lughnasa

This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in 1936. We meet them at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken revelry and dancing. 

Their spare existence is interrupted by brief, colourful bursts of music from the radio, their only link to the romance and hope of the world at large. 

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The action of the play is told through the memory of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters as he remembers the five women who raised him: his mother and four maiden aunts. He is only seven in 1936, the year his elderly uncle, a priest, returns after serving for 25 years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. 

For the young boy, two other disturbances occur that summer. The sisters acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. And he meets his father for the first time, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields. 

From these small events spring the cracks that destroy the foundation of the family forever. 

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