Yerma

Synopsis

Yerma is a humble peasant woman, who longs for a child. In her village all her friends are raising families, but she remains childless. She tries to be light-hearted and believes that she and her husband will soon be blessed with a baby. As long as her condition, or lack of it, is temporary, she endures it and seeks to remedy it! Gradually Yerma's deep love for her husband turns to disbelief and then hate as she discovers he does not want a child. However, her own pride and honour forbid her to take pleasure or revenge with another man. Overcome with desire and frustration Yerma is driven to the ultimate crime of passion....

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 14 November 2011

As a play about frustrated maternal instincts, Anthony Weigh’s version of Lorca’s play will do well enough, and Natalie Abrahami’s production on a red sandpit, surrounded by the audience on three sides and a corrugated iron fence, is taut and compelling.

But this is a complete re-write of Lorca, and a severe diminution of the folk ritual and Spanish-ness of the original 1934 tragedy: no choruses, no washerwomen in the great second act, and the virile Victor of Ross Anderson (his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open, so he must be virile) is a butcher whose sexuality and blood-soaked abattoir bug the over-demure, pale-skinned English rose of Ty Glaser’s barren heroine.

An ever-present small boy (mop-haired Billy Kennedy alternating with Felix Rubens, both ten year-olds making professional debuts) – the one she never had, nor will have – slides in and out of the cat flap, and her best friend Maria (a raunchy performance by Alison O'Donnell), who can’t stop popping babi...

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