Cast member Orla Hill, playing Agnes, reflects on her various fascinating biographical connections to Dancing at Lughnasa
My mother's mother was born in Coote Hill, County Cavan, one of six sisters. Not quite one-in-five as the Mundys were, but two of her sisters were called Christine and Margaret. Perhaps this indicates a remarkably small breadth of Irish baby name books, rather than a remarkably large coincidence. Though surely, we reach the limit of happenstance when I found myself, cast as Agnes in this production, living a few streets over from Bríd Brennan.
I've bumped into Bríd many times as a child, standing shyly as she chatted to my parents. She knows them through my grandfather, another of the London Irish, who my mum met through work. I knew she was an actor, though not that she was in Dancing at Lughnasa, or that she had played Agnes. Bríd created the role of Agnes as far as any actor can create a character that was written by someone else and based on a real person. She was Agnes in the opening run in Dublin, in the West End, on Broadway and on the big screen. After Friel died, she and various other cast members even read extracts from Dancing at Lughnasa in the Glenties themselves as a memorial to the man who had brought them together. Knowing her is a delight, and the opportunity to discuss the role of Agnes with her an unimaginable gift.
"Knowing her is a delight, and the opportunity to discuss the role of Agnes with her an unimaginable gift. "
There is a shop in our local town in Meath where the woman behind the counter won't say a nice word to my mother, as she dated the boy the shop assistant had her eye on when they were sixteen. There is also the pub my mother used to spend every Saturday night in, drinking Guinness and playing pool, that she has refused to re-enter for some forty years now. The memories held within are good, but the wave of nostalgia is threatening.
My grandmother emigrated to Glasgow at fifteen to work as a maid in a priest's house, eventually moving to London to live with her sisters. She began working in the Museum Tavern, by the British Museum, where she met my grandfather. She tried to throw him out of the pub, mistaking one ginger Irishman for another who had previously hit on her.
Some time after realising he was in fact a different Irish ginger man, they had eleven children in South London. They eventually returned to Ireland, having managed to send every one of their brood into the grown-up world, equipped with a university degree and an English accent.
Far from any numinous interference, Catholic, Pagan, or otherwise, I ascribe my devotion to this play to something much simpler: the desire to know the stories of one's people. For our diasporic community, reminiscence is an artform, and an essential one. And even when I am within Ireland among cousins who've never left, stories are shared around the stove of my grandparent's house, peppered with hot cries of disagreement on certain particulars of the narrative. Not knowing how a story goes is a ridiculous reason not to tell it. The quarrels over the tales become new embellishments that enrich the gossip. We ask: who had they heard that from? And how should they know? These elastic threads of conversations tie us together, stretching across the island and over the seas to England and America and beyond; those with Irish heritage finding each other around the globe, bound by mutual friends and enemies.
"For our diasporic community, reminiscence is an artform, and an essential one."
One road leading to Tonashammer, the land of my grandfather's people, is called the Beltane, after one of the old pagan 'quarter' festivals, another of which is Lughnasa. However, my grandfather, Pat, always insisted it was named as such because you could belt eight along it. For a community that has a complex history with nomenclature, also the topic of one of Friel's other plays, Translations, having multiple reasons for the rightful name of a place seems like a victory. But Beltane is the Anglicised version of the Irish 'Bealtaine': is that a 'correct' name? How can we tell a 'true' story if the names are not certain? There is a place words alone cannot take us, and that is where we hope to take you tonight.
Dancing at Lughnasa
by Brian Friel
Tuesday 29 October - Saturday 2 November, 7.45PM
ADC Theatre
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