29 pages • 58 minutes read
Brian FrielDancing At Lughnasa
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act IIChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act II Summary
The play’s second act begins in early September, two weeks after the events of the first act. Young Michael’s kites sit on the table, where he writes a letter to Santa Claus. Maggie teases him about how the kites never flew and asks what he’s writing about. Michael explains that he wants a bell for the bike his dad claims to have bought him. Knowing Michael’s dad will probably never give him a bike, Maggie attempts to distract him with riddles.
Jack enters the room looking healthy, but dressed in the odd combination of his army uniform and sister’s sweater. He hears church bells ring, and Maggie explains they’re coming from the high-class wedding of Austin Morgan. Jack converses much more fluently than before and strongly recalls memories. Kate asks if he’ll begin mass soon. At this remark, Jack seems confused about where he is, suggesting they summon villagers for mass with a gong. He describes the harvest festivals of Uganda, which revolve around drinking and dancing. When he cheerfully departs for a walk, the sisters whisper about how he’s changed. Kate expresses concern for their reputation.
Gerry and Christina enter after dancing around the garden. He announces he’s joining an international brigade to fight against Franco’s Fascist army in the Spanish Civil War. Kate denounces his “godless” (52) brigade because Franco is supported by the Catholic church. Gerry explains that he does not have any political allegiances, but the brigade is his best bet for a job, as he isn’t selling any gramophones. He hopes the war will bring adventure, naively declaring that it will all be over by Christmas.
Agnes returns from picking berries, but Rose is not with her. Agnes mentions that Rose was wearing her good shoes when she departed, and complaining of an upset stomach. Maggie realizes Rose has gone to see Danny Bradley in the back hills. When Rose returns home, she admits that she went to the hills with Danny and saw what’s left of Lughnasa’s fires. Rose also claims that the Sweeney boy is recovering from his burns.
Christina tells Kate that a new glove factory has opened in town, depriving Rose and Agnes of their livelihood. Though urged to apply for work in the factory, Agnes knows Rose will never be hired. Instead, Rose and Agnes decide to leave home, notifying the family of their departure in a letter left on the breakfast table.
Adult Michael narrates that he tracked down his aunts twenty-five years later, in London. When he discovered them, Agnes was dead and Rose was dying in a hospice for the destitute. He learns they moved around, taking cleaning jobs, until Rose could no longer get work. They became homeless and Agnes died of exposure. Michael also explains that Jack never said mass again. Rather, Jack continued to share anecdotes of Uganda that shocked Kate until she explained his beliefs as “his own distinctive spiritual search” (60). When Jack died of a sudden heart attack, Kate was inconsolable. Gerry, meanwhile, was wounded in Barcelona falling off his motor-bike and could no longer dance. Michael eventually received a letter from his half-brother of the same name, revealing that Gerry married another woman and had a family. Michael’s mother worked in the glove factory for the rest of her life, a job which she hated. Kate eventually found work as a tutor for Austin Morgan, the man she was infatuated with. Michael says he left home as soon as he was old enough, and that the spirit of the house died after Rose, Agnes, and Jack were gone.
With these grim events foreshadowed, the play returns to 1936, where the mood is still light. Maggie says she wishes she could go to Uganda, and Jack jokes that he could get one man for all of them. Gerry dances with all of the sisters, singing a lighthearted song of change: “‘In olden times a glimpse of a stocking/Was looked on as something shocking/But now—’” (65). Jealous, Christina switches off the set.
They enjoy the last warm evening with a dinner outside. Their enjoyment, however, is dampened by ominous images. Rose emerges holding her dead rooster, which was killed by a fox. Jack emerges wearing his age-tarnished uniform. Young Michael emerges with his kites and reveals their artwork for first time: a pair of crude, cruelly-grinning faces.
As adult Michael delivers his final monologue, the actors resume positions that mimic the opening of the first scene. He reflects on memory, how it feels “simultaneously actual and illusory…a dream music that is both heard and imagined; that seems both itself and its own echo” (71). In the background, Marconi plays “It’s Time to say Goodnight,” and everyone—even the kites—sways softly from side to side.
Act II Analysis
As Kate predicted, change takes hold of the family—and the world at large—in Act Two of Dancing at Lughnasa. On the familial level, there is the symbolic convergence of three different “bells”: the bell Michael requests from Santa for the bike his father never sends; the church bell, which sounds the wedding of Austin Morgan, the man Kate was in love with; and the Ugandan gong Jack suggests in place of a church bell, to summon the congregation for mass. All of these ringing bells evoke failed hopes, desires, and aspirations, giving the audience the sense that time is up.
Act Two also illustrates the effects of the late-to-arrive Industrial Revolution in Northwestern Ireland. The establishment of mechanized factories displaces cottage businesses, such as the glove-making project of Rose and Agnes. As a “simple” woman (arguably with an intellectual disability), Rose is especially vulnerable. Rose cannot maintain employment in a fast-paced environment, where she would have to work long hours with dangerous machines. When Agnes and Rose refuse to work in the factory, they begin a steady process of socioeconomic disintegration, moving from low-paying temporal jobs, to joblessness, to substance-dependency and homelessness.
On the macro level of change, Act Two also discusses the complexity of Irish civilian recruitment for the Spanish Civil War (made even more complex by the fact that Gerry is actually from Wales). Gerry has no ideological stake in the war and doesn’t even understand the thick Northern Irish accent of the recruiter, let alone the cause he’ll be fighting for. Kate’s politics seem equally short-sighted, as she is not concerned with conflict of fascism versus democracy so much as the fact that Franco is a Spanish Catholic. Further change (and implied moral disintegration) is embodied in the twenty-five-year-old army uniform. When Jack puts on the uniform, it is age-tarnished and in disrepair, an effigy of Jack’s saint-like British Army photograph.
Change nevertheless blends with overtones of sameness when Jack further elucidates Ugandan rituals. Maggie jokingly asks if Jack could find men for all four of them (excluding Rose) to marry in Uganda, and Jack proclaims, “I couldn’t promise four men but I should be able to get one husband for all of you” (63)—an already-present dynamic that articulates itself when Gerry dances with Agnes and Maggie. Jack describes a household hierarchy of chores and duties that seems amusingly similar to the situation they currently live in. He also describes rituals of pagan sacrifice involving a rooster that resemble the rituals of Lughnasa. While Friel positions this paganism as a free-spirited counter to Kate’s controlling Catholicism, it is important to note that he doesn’t land in favor of any religious practice. Ultimately, the family’s “last supper” of the warm season is confronted with the ominous omen of Rose’s dead rooster: not a sacrifice for the harvest, simply a sad death at the teeth of a fox.
Change and sameness converge with the final scene’s closing as characters very nearly resume their original positions on stage. They sway gently back and forth in a vague space between a dance and a tableau, much akin to the vague space of memory wherein everything seems “both itself and its own echo” (71).
