Lughnasa: Ghosts?

Somewhat in the vein of viewing character orchestration, I was a little put off by the fact that, in Dancing at Lughnasa, the boy is imaginary. All of his lines are delivered by older Michael, who stands off to the side. This is an interesting approach to presentation, but is also jarring somewhat as if the boy never existed– a phantasm haunting the memories of his aunts and mother. However, it does as a layer of separation, showing that Michael is removed, that he is looking back. But Michael also delivers his own monologues, which provide the audience with the internal musings of the boy/his older insites. The play runs as if it somewhat doesn’t need young Michael at all. The main focus plays around the women. Gerry and Chris have Michael, and Gerry comes by to see both of them. However, if Gerry and Chris were to have tried for a child and failed, or the boy die young. The connections between the two would still be similar, providing a different progression of the play, but it would still provide the same outcome for the other women– the advancement of society and break away from tradition.

The Marconi provides the women a window beyond the conventional, but the window is very similar to that of the past, the festival of Lughnasa is a pagan harvest celebration that breaks catholic tradition, which Kate sees as hedonistic, warning against continuously. The women embrace this freedom of the festival as an escape from the traditional norms, but at the same time, the traditional norms are weakened by the the progression of society and technology. Marconi allows the women to dance to music whenever it is working properly, isolating tradition in a lone bubble on the timeline of history. We return to the old, unstructured ways more easily than we may think.

Back to Michael, albeit a decent narrator with his own story, his role in the play ad a child is greatly eclipsed by the other women and his lack of physical presence further facilitates the notion of his removal from the play entirely.

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