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 Andalucía 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?