There are two Michaels in Dancing at Lughnasa. The first is an adult man who narrates the play, framing the action of 1936 as a memory he recalls many years later. The second is Michael is a seven-year-old boy (the age he was in 1936). There is even (arguably) a third version of Michael that does not appear on stage but is addressed in his narration: a half-brother of his same age and name who sends him a letter in the 1950s.

Both (physical) versions of Michael are positioned in such a way that they are simultaneously present and absent in his memory, an idea which accords with Michael’s reflection of memory as a gray space “between what seemed to be and what was…” (2) and a feeling that seems “both itself and its own echo” (71). The sensibility of being one’s “own echo” is augmented by Friel’s direction that the adult Michael “also speaks the lines of the boy, i.e. himself when he was seven” (i). Young Michael is often absent from the audience’s view, making kites whose artwork is not revealed until the very end of the play.