Federico
Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding is based on one of the simplest and oldest of plots.
A groom is about to marry a bride who is in love with another man. After the
wedding the bride runs off with the man that she loves. The jilted groom gives
chase and we have the inevitable tragic ending.
This is
the story that Lorca took from a newspaper clipping and turned into a complex,
poetic and brilliant play that examines Spanish society in the 1920’s. The play
reaches from rural Spain to Ancient Greek drama in its elemental power and
emotional depth.
Colin
Palangio, Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster & Deborah Drakeford. Photo Cylla von
Tiedemann
Soulpepper’s
production, directed by Erin Brandenburg, has attempted to tackle the poetic
and emotional complexities of the play with limited success. The fundamental
problem, I think, is the failure to find the proper emotional wavelength and
poetic style for the play.
In the
first scene we meet the Mother (Diana D’Aquila - the characters have no names
except for Leonardo), a woman whose husband and son have been killed and is
afraid that the same may befall her son the Groom (Gordon Hecht). The Mother
should express deep emotional pain and fear. Diana D’Aquila goes some way but
speaks a bit too quickly and does not reach the emotional depth that the play
calls for.
In the
second scene we move from the naturalistic scene with the Mother, the Groom and
the Neighbour (Caroline Gillis) to the home of Leonardo (Colin Palangio), his
Wife (Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster) and her Mother-in-Law (Deborah Drakeford). The
scene begins and ends with a lullaby for the baby that is reminiscent of a
choral ode. There is a domestic argument in the middle between the Husband and
the Wife about his behaviour. Most of the poetry is simply lost.
When the
lights go on, we see a couple of musicians on stage and hear music composed by
Andrew Penner. I found very little in the music that resonated with the poetry.
At one time the music descended to the beat of a hoedown and at others the
singing and the music were dangerously close to simple cacophony. The elegiac
verses of the lullaby as well as the poetic lines recited by the Moon (Andrew
Penner), the Bride (Hailey Gillis) and Leonardo later in the play lost most of
their effect.
The only
way to express the tragic end of the play is through the elegiac verses. Any
attempt at expressing the grief of the Mother, the Bride and the Wife through
conventional weeping and wailing is bound to strike us as melodramatic. Lorca
composed lines that evoke the suffering of Christ and the destruction wrought
by a small knife (an image from the first scene). The scene should be cathartic
but in this production it was only moving.
Lorca gave
some specific instructions about the sets. The Groom’s room is yellow;
Leonardo’s room is pink; the interior of the Bride’s cave is white; the final
scene is in a white room with arches resembling a church. Set and Costume
Designer Anahita Dehbonehie has pared all of this down to a simple set with a
wide open sky in the background. The lighting obviously changes when the Moon
appears. The costumes do not seem to indicate any particular location. The
Neighbour who is dressed in black with a black kerchief could be in most
Mediterranean countries. The set and costumes did not pose any problems.
In the
end, however, the griefs and poetry of this difficult but great play are largely
missing. How disappointing.
_________
Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca in a translation by
Guillermo Verdecchia opened on March 15 and will run until April 9, 2016 at the Young Centre for the Performing
Arts, 55 Tank House Lane, Toronto, Ontario. www.soulpepper.ca
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