Monday, 31 March 2014

Blood Wedding

Drama on 3 recently broadcast Lorca's rural trilogy (Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba, Blood Wedding). I was only able to catch Blood Wedding, in Ted Hughes's version, first broadcast in 2008. I think the first encounter I had with Bodas de Sangre was the opera by Nicola LeFanu, which Rosie Williams led a trip to all the way back in 1992 (my wife and I still merrily sing the first jolting line, 'Give me the knife' to each other, at appropriate moments). Reading the original later brought home to me Lorca's absolutely precise theatrical language: symbolic colours, in both scenery and language, the brusque and controlled rhythms of the writing, the purity of the whole conception. Lorca was not a poet who did occasional theatre. He was a prolific playwright, saturated in the repertoire, and a founder member of a company, La Barraca, which took Spanish classics to remote places. In Bodas de Sangre, the sense of the visual and physical is as strong as the verbal - with a radio play, the imagination becomes the designer, conjuring sun-drenched plains and moonlit forests at the prompting of the words.

Now that we're  so familiar with TV realism, these symbolist works of nearly a century ago have a peculiar freshness. Hughes's account is surely right to lift the work beyond Spain (where a real event in Almeria inspired it) to a universal plane: feuds, love, the battle between passion and social pressures are, after all, part of the human experience from AndalucĂ­a to the Andes and beyond. The northern accents of the radio version fell nicely into place. Every time I experience it, the opening out into the dream world after the lovers flee seems magical: the voices of Death and the Moon, the shimmering imagery, the homing in of the inevitable and tragic conclusion. There are various complete versions in Spanish on YouTube, including a 1938 film and Carlos Saura's. Indeed, YT seems very rich in complete Lorca plays in general. In these days of gender transfer, I can't help feeling an all-male Bernarda Alba could have real force if done completely straight. Has anyone ever tried it?

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