Academic Journal 8 - 'Dancing at Lughnasa' (Film)

On our walk home after watching the film adaptation of ‘Dancing at Lughnasa,’ Keith and I got into a discussion about the scene in which Uncle Jack encounters Rose at the back hills fire, and after a bit of unpleasantness with Danny Bradley, escorts her home. Danny coerces Rose to go with him, and is clingy and belligerent throughout, even threatening to follow her when she leaves with Jack. The entire scene is absent from the play, and her time in the hills is only mentioned briefly by Rose without any of the unpleasant overtones of the film sequence. In fact, she and Danny went up to see the “what was left of the Lughnasa fires” (59). She says that she and Danny were the only ones there, and that the experience was peaceful. Of course, she may have been lying (in the film she relates nothing of her negative experience to her sisters), but lacking any evidence from the text we are forced to take her word for it.
At first I found it odd that the director would add this scene at all, and doubly so that he would make it such a dark experience, demonizing Danny and, by extension, his cohorts at the fire and the ceremony itself. In discussion with Keith, he pointed out something that I hadn’t paid much attention to – that when Uncle Jack escorts Rose away from the fire, he appears visibly shaken, recoiling from the revelry he had until then been participating in (ostensibly as it connected with his years in Africa). Although he joined in as a happy participant, he is clearly unsettled and afraid.
Shortly after this sequence, we see Uncle Jack again – trading hats with Gerry. In this sequence, the actor plays him as lucid, completely in command of his faculties, all but recovered from his culture shock. It’s almost as if his rejection of paganism at the Lughnasa fires has led to a miraculous recovery. This doesn’t come across in the play, but with the addition of the fires sequence and the way it is handled by the director and actors, it seems to send the message that Jack’s mental troubles all stem from his fall into paganism. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the director was trying to make that the “message” of the film, but it is interesting how such a small addition to the adaptation can send a vastly different message.