Dancing
One thing needs to be understood initially about this play. The title is not a reference to a literal event occurring within the story. Secondly, dancing at Lughnasa specifically is a symbol related to a much larger allegorical metaphor associated with dancing. At one point late in the play, this broader contextual metaphorical landscape is made abundantly clear by Michael when he observes that dancing is a way of communicating:
“as if language no longer existed, because words were no longer necessary.”
The Music of Memory
It is while in the wistful moment of reflection that Michael makes clear the metaphor of dancing that he also comments upon the fact this is a play taking place in a memory. The very first line is Michael informing the audience that he is recalling the summer of 1936, the time in which the play is set. As the plays begins drawing to a close, Michael muses that:
“…the memory of that summer is like a dream to me, a dream of music that is both heard and imagined.”
Spoiler Alert...Sort of
Michael’s all-knowing omniscience as the author of the story told from memory hints at how certain characters end up. Without mentioning any names here, the future of two of them of them are also conveyed through metaphorical imagery:
“Years later I learned that they ended as shadows on the streets of London, scraping a living together, dying alone.”
The Girl Gander
The oldest of the five sisters in the play is Kate. She’s 40 years old, a schoolteacher and conservative. She is also mockingly referred to metaphorically in her classroom as “the gander.” In the hands of even a playwright who was simply less brilliant than Brian Friel, but still better than most, Kate could easily have become little more than the almost excruciating on point stereotype she appears to be. It is Kate’s commitment to her moral center that allows her to escape this constriction, however, and that moral center is inextricably connected to Irish Catholicism:
“I am woman enough to know what modesty is. A woman’s modesty is everything.”
Lughnasa
The title is actually a combination of two metaphorical images. Dancing has been covered, of course, but what about Lughnasa? Lughnasa is a midsummer harvest celebration named in honor of an ancient Gaelic god. In the play, however, the metaphorical has become literal and the literal has become metaphorical:
“We got our first wireless set [radio] set that summer…and it obsessed us. We called him Lugh, after the old pagan god of the harvest, and his festival was Lughnasa, a time of music and dance”
