Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa: Screenplay

It is 1936 and harvest time in County Donegal, where the living is anything but easy. The five Mundy sisters and seven-year-old Michael, the child of the youngest sister, form a tightly knit and proud family community just outside the village of Ballybeg. When their gentle brother Jack, a missionary priest in Africa, returns after twenty five years, it is clear that all is not well. And then Gerry, Michael's itinerant father, arrives after a two-year absence. Loved by one sister and coveted by another, Gerry's presence unsettles the family.Frank McGuinness's screenplay of Brian Friel's play evokes the interior landscape of a group of human beings trapped in their domestic environment and offers a commentary on the wider landscape, interior and exterior, Christian and Pagan, to which they are intrinsically related.