Blood Wedding

The first of Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1930s rural dramas is an almost wilfully inappropriate choice of play for the Scoop’s open air summer season next to the Mayor’s headquarters and Tower Bridge; a world of passion, vineyards, poetic symbolism and wedding rituals surrounded by gleaming glass and chrome offices, huge cranes and boozing city workers.

Yet Phil Willmott’s production for Steam Industry – marking the company’s sixth anniversary of free performances in the Scoop at More London – battles with an intensity that suits Lorca’s play. A large Friday night audience was fully engaged with the story, and I think mildly astonished, too, by the violent tragedy and the power of the late Ted Hughes’s lyrical, muscular and poetic translation.

This is not an easy arena. There are too many distractions and too much concrete. But the stage area is marked off with lanterns and the Andalusian countryside evoked in Libby Watson’s design in a series of pastel-coloured standing flats that resemble a vertical view of a giant ice-cream counter.

Famously based on a reported newspaper scandal, the ninety-minute play has a poetic momentum scorched with documentary realism: the unnamed Bride (Emily Patrikios) runs off with her former lover, the now married Leonardo, on her wedding day. The equally unnamed Bridegroom (James Alper) is left looking silly (not even holding a baby) with his scheming Mother in the middle of the ritualistic knees-up.

Tragedy soon takes over as a white-clad Moon teams up with witch-like Death and a couple of peasants ominously unravel a skein of red wool. The events are rooted in material greed, dynastic antipathies and the inevitable demise of a last son (as in J M Synge’s Riders From the Sea).

Ursula Mohan is tremendous in the great maternal role. Owen Young is a dashing Leonardo. Otherwise, Willmott’s actors compensate with enthusiasm for what they lack in experience and “bottom.” It all just about hangs together, bolstered by an effective mixture of sevillanas and tango music by Joe Fredericks and some clever choric tableaux.

Leonardo’s bunch are described as “a family of smiles wrapped round knives”; the play is rife with the knife culture of a distant barbarism made to seem much closer, now I think about it, in the middle of our own urban nightmare. By the end, I was surprised that Boris Johnson hadn’t popped out of his office next door to make a blunt speech about sharp weaponry.

-Michael Coveney