Blood Wedding

Synopsis

Lorca offers his poetic and disturbing personal vision of Spanish life in the 1930's. In a society where all weddings are blood weddings, this classical tragedy, starkly plotted, offers all the traditional elements of ill fated lovers and family feuds.

Our Review:

13 May 2005

Two months after the National revived The House of Bernarda Alba, the final instalment in Federico Garcia Lorca’s famous Andalusian trilogy, comes the Almeida’s presentation of the first play in the triptych, Blood Wedding – and the contrasts are striking. While Howard Davies’ production of the former, in a fresh translation by David Hare, strove for naturalism, the latter is highly stylised.

That stylisation is not entirely a production choice, although director Rufus Norris and adapter Tanya Ronder do much to heighten it. Lorca was a celebrated poet as well as a dramatist and a close associate of other Spanish avant-gardists like artist Salvador Dali and filmmaker Luis Bunuel. His original script for this 1933 play, about a bride who runs away with her former lover on her wedding day, includes large chunks of verse, injections of music and characterisations of Death and the Moon.

In an introduction to the new playt...

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Latest User Review

195.188.208.240) - 13 June 2005:

Pants. Wish I'd listened to addictedtotheatre....

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