Dancing at Lughnasa

A profound, luminous masterpiece by one of Ireland’s greatest playwrights.

This edition was published in 2023 with a beautifully redesigned text and cover, to coincide with the National Theatre’ revival.

It is 1936 and harvest time in County Donegal. In a house just outside the village of Ballybeg live the five adult Mundy sisters; their older brother, a missionary priest returned from Uganda; and the youngest sister’s seven-year-old son, Michael. Over the course of two days in the family’s life, Brian Friel evokes not only the interior world of a group of human beings trapped in their domestic situation, but the wider landscape – public and private, Christian and pagan – of which they are nonetheless a part.

‘There is no doubting we are in the thrall of as masterly a dramatist as the theatre possesses.’ The Times