Word: ballybeg
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...play opens in 1833, at a schoolhouse in the rural Irish township of Ballybeg. British soldiers settle in to map and rename Ireland, forcibly replacing Gaelic place names with English and suppressing the Irish language...
Hugh's own son Owen (Rufus Sewell) is the soldiers translator, returning to Ballybeg after six years in Dublin. He says to the villagers, "My job is to interpret your quaint, archaic tongue into the King's English...
...accompanies Captain Lancey (Geoffrey Wade) and Lieutenant George Yolland (Michael Compsty) as they enter the schoolhouse with their renaming plan. The native spirit of Ballybeg fascinates George. "I've moved to a consciousness that isn't striving and agitated, but is perfectly at ease with its self-assurance," he says...
...title refers to a merry harvest festival in County Donegal. But the action never leaves the cottage and yard of the five Mundy sisters, living poor and unmarried in tumbledown Ballybeg in the hard year of 1936, with no entertainment but a balky old radio and their Celtic gift for chat. The play is a memory play, told as flashbacks from the present by a middle-aged man who was then a boy of seven. He is the illegitimate son of the most rebellious Mundy sister by a wandering wastrel who, after years away, comes to call. The Mundy women...
Friel has been much influenced by Chekhov. Aristocrats was unabashedly Chekhovian, a sort of Ballybeg version of The Cherry Orchard. But Chekhov never attempted anything like Lughnasa's narrative complexity, and never wrote so richly about the unprivileged. This time there are no echoes of homage in Friel's work, just authentic originality...