Academic Journal 1 - 'Dancing at Lughnasa'

I found the narrative style of this play to be very interesting; the narrating character (Michael as an adult) fills us in on the setting and history of the other characters before the narrative begins, and tells us of the fates of the other characters after it ends, and in-between speaks the lines of his own younger self without actually playing the part (Friel dictates that dialogue I addressed to the imaginary “Boy,” while Michael speaks in his narratorial, adult voice). There is no actor playing the part of young Michael, and all physical interactions with him are pantomimed; his presence is referred to by other characters and implied by his ability to present this story in flashback as an adult, but his physical absence leads the reader to forget that he is there, only “feeling” present when attention is directly called to him.

In reading, it feels as though Friel has taken an external narrator and a focal character and rolled them into one part, moving freely in time and story-space. This technique allows Friel to set up the story and give us a glimpse of the future via a narrator without having an awkward, unexplained “extra” character wandering around observing things (or clumsily written into the background). Using the actor playing adult Michael to voice the young Michael as well creates a connection between the past and present, forging a strong and explicit link between the focal character and external narrator which would have been weakened by having a child play the part.

At the same time, I feel that this technique risks casting Michael as a particularly unreliable narrator. The entire narrative is presented as the memory of a child as recounted by him as an adult, putting a particularly lengthy gap for memory to overcome and implying that it is subject to forgotten details, shuffled timelines and mental editing. The child who becomes our focal character often appears to be absent, even when he is implicitly present (and then, only rarely in the same room as the adult characters), and moreover is presented as preoccupied with building kites, hiding and bushes, writing to Santa and so on. The idea that a child with such a busy schedule would have paid any attention to the goings-on of the house, much less committed them all to memory, seems questionable.

I suspect that reading the play rather than watching it performed weakens these effects; although I knew that Boy and Michael are the same actor using the same voice, in my mind Boy always sounded like a child, and Michael like an adult. Conversely, this tendency to forget the link between them also seemed to reduce the sense of unreliability; it was only when I forced myself to picture the play as performed that these things occurred to me.