A Review of Lorca's Blood Wedding
In a recent review for The Mail Online, Patrick Marmion hastened to dismiss Yaël Farber’s interpretation of Lorca’s Blood Wedding:
‘Overdone? You betcha — with nuts on top […] There’s only so much soil worship I can take without recourse to the bar’.
If one puts aside the pessimistic assumption that writers for that publication seek only to deliver affront rather than genuine critique, it is nearly impossible to understand how and why Marmion reached such a dismal conclusion regarding this play. For one thing, Marmion’s caustic disparagement of ‘soil worship’ seems to unwittingly let slip his own unfamiliarity with the subject matter of the play itself, rather than offer any genuine reproach to Marina Carr’s contemporary interpretation or indeed Farber’s creative execution. Written in 1932, Blood Wedding was conceived of as by Lorca as one volume in what has come to be known as his Rural Trilogy; a tripartite homage to the specific customs, joys, and attendant hardships of rural Spain. Thus, though Farber is unquestionably liberal in his deviation from certain traditionalisms relating to the play, the director’s focus on rurality and place fall happily in line with Lorca’s own creative vision.
Furthermore, in choosing to relocate the play from distinctively early-twentieth-century Spain to a more temporally ambiguous Ireland, Carr circumvents Marmion’s implicit charge of fetishization of old world rural isolation: though undeniably anachronistic, the world which the play depicts is not one of peasantry ‘soil worship’ but rather a microcosm of universal human fallibility. Indeed, what connects Carr’s interpretation to Lorca’s original play most clearly is not the rustic setting; rather, it is the immutability of ubiquitous human error, and the dangers of valuing property and wealth at the expense of human life. As such, the play holds an unsettling mirror to the turbulent times that we ourselves live in and the society that we consequentially choose to mould, in which a human life may be so easily sacrificed in the name of perpetuating primordial hatred in an endless bloody waltz of score-settling.
Indeed, one significant change implemented by Carr and Farber relates the characterization of The Moon, typically conceived of as ‘bloodthirsty’, insatiable in its ‘desire for blood to warm its world’. Certainly, it has historically been impossible to conceive of Blood Wedding without a happily conspiratorial moon, secretly plotting the demise of the human protagonists along with Death masquerading as a Beggar Woman. However, in Thalissa Teixeira’s portrayal of The Moon, we see a distinct rejection of this one-dimensional characterization. Teixeira’s Moon, though no doubt implicated in the scenes of human misery which unfold within the play, nonetheless remains ambiguous in her intentions. At times, she appears frustrated and even moved by the follies of the human world, specifically by the seemingly inexhaustible recourse to violence and rejection of all tenderness. By casting doubt upon The Moon’s willingness to be complicit, Carr and Farber thus place the responsibility for the tragedy yet to unfold firmly at the feet of the human protagonists. As such, Blood Wedding ultimately serves as a timely reminder of our own capacity to err, and the devastating brutality this often entails. Rather than falling back on old tropes of supernatural intervention, it opts instead to challenge audiences into questioning their own baser instincts, and in doing so reminds us of art’s capacity to challenge the prevailing logic of its time.
Written by Lucy Lawrenson
Lucy is a UCL graduate from Politics and French. She lives in North London with her best friends. Lucy enjoys crisp sandwiches, ITV dramas and leftist politics. Lucy dislikes getting up to go to work and Brexit. She hopes to one day pursue a career in Geopolitics
References:
Marmion, Patrick: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7509095/Vote-winners-Not-Ladies-writes-PATRICK-MARMION.html
Blood Wedding is at the Young Vic in London until 2nd November. Buy tickets here.