aixcentric

Organiser Karen adds: Remember to print out and bring your tickets.  Feel feel to bring friends.  There is no interval in this play.

In one fell – but felicitous – swoop, Simon Stone has remade Lorca for the English stage. Completely in tune with the Young Vic’s policy of bringing craic to the classics, the 31-year-old Australian director and writer has performed improbable surgery on Yerma, Federica Garcia Lorca’s 1934 play about a woman who cannot conceive. He has stripped it of washerwomen, shepherds, poetic effusions. He has transplanted the action from rural Spain to present-day London, and made its heroine a lifestyle journalist and blogger. He shows the yearning of the central figure, the pressure that builds up around her, and the desperation that engulfs her, as utterly contemporary.

I

n one fell – but felicitous – swoop, Simon Stone has remade Lorca for the English stage. Completely in tune with the Young Vic’s policy of bringing craic to the classics, the 31-year-old Australian director and writer has performed improbable surgery on Yerma, Federica Garcia Lorca’s 1934 play about a woman who cannot conceive. He has stripped it of washerwomen, shepherds, poetic effusions. He has transplanted the action from rural Spain to present-day London, and made its heroine a lifestyle journalist and blogger. He shows the yearning of the central figure, the pressure that builds up around her, and the decraic to the classics, the 31-year-old Australian director and writer has performed improbable surgery on Yerma, Federica Garcia Lorca’s 1934 play about a woman who cannot conceive. He has stripped it of washerwomen, shepherds, poetic effusions. He has transplanted the action from rural Spain to present-day London, and made its heroine a lifestyle journalist and blogger. He shows the yearning of the central figure, the pressure that builds up around her, and the deNot him alone. Billie Piper, the least dried-up of actresses, is earth-quaking in the title role: yerma is Spanish for barren. She scythes through the different registers of the play with her unique combination of slangy poise and bunched-up physicality. She begins twinkling away with arch knowingness as one half of a pampered couple. She moves – surprising herself with her wish for a child – to banshee fury and to druggy dislocation. Frustrated, she paws the ground with her foot like an impatient pony.

 Sympathies slide between her and her partner, wonderfully played by Brendan Cowell with a mixture of innocent affection and casual incomprehension. Crucial to the production’s triumph are its manoeuvres in and out of naturalism. This is loyal to Lorca. Though the speech is totally secular and 21st-century, the drama has a liturgical movement. It is a requiem for lost hope. Stefan Gregory’s soundscape and music thrum between scenes, which are captioned, Brecht-style, with dates and headlines on a screen: “A year later”, “An ex reappeared”. The heroine’s confessional blog nods at Catholicism.

 

Lizzie Clachan’s extraordinary design encloses the stage in transparent walls. It could be a glass case to display a jewelled life, a fragile bubble, a membrane, or a shrine. Lorca’s watery fertility images are suggested in miraculously swift set changes. A bare house becomes a garden which is first verdant, then shrivelled. A mud-clogged Glastonbury looks like the home of the damned.