After the Lakeside’s recent production of Federico García Lorca's Amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa en su Jardin at Lakeside, it 's now the turn of The Lace Market Theatre to get to grips with the Spanish playwright in their staging of Yerma. Written in 1934, Yerma is a tragic poem of a woman, the eponymous heroine, driven to desperation by her position in society and her callous and uncaring husband.
Upon learning that her husband may be the reason she has been unable to conceive, Yerma, desperate to have children, finds herself conflicted - will she rekindle with old lover Victor or partake in almost pagan fertility ceremonies in a final bid to become pregnant. With her life picked over by the bickering gossips of the town's washerwomen, Yerma retreats to a hermitage high in the mountains, a place to which many women unable to conceive have made a pilgrimage. When Juan confronts her there, revealing he values money over their having a son, things turn even more desperate and bloody.
This is a strong production, with Rosina Reading's Yerma leading the cast well - she is hardly ever off stage in the over-an-hour-long production. The strongest scenes are those between Yerma and her friend Maria, Teya Simone, in who the titular lead finds an equally strong foil, and in the appearances of Andrés Vallellano as the one who got away, Victor. Spaniard Vallellano gets the melodrama of the text and whilst some of the dialogue is lost in his accent and diction, he has a strong physical presence that tells of his yearning. Dani Wain's Mariposa is over-sexualised in her gestures and a bit too much of the sledgehammer symbolism whilst Damian Fredo makes for a stilted Juan.
The scenes are fairly well-directed but there's a heavy-handed lighting design and some under-thought through transitions, which if corrected could easily make the show flow better. Other sections feel rushed, especially the choral voices of the washerwomen, and letting them breathe would have given the production more poetry in their ensemble bickering.
Lorca's brand of "feminism" has not aged well, although an all-female production of the text might shed some new light on its positions. This said, read as an almost satirical allegory, we can see some of the pain of women in such positions, driven to radical means.
It's an enjoyable and ultimately bloodthirsty production which gains much from the immediacy of its traverse staging in the studio at the Lace Market. The tragedy unfolds before you at a grasping distance and that close liveness is one of the best things in it. There are some clunks and some misses but on the whole it’s a show which strips back much of the clutter to show, as unimpeded as possible, a woman standing on the edge.
Yerma is at The Lace Market Theatre Thursday 3 July and Friday 4 July.
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