Tribalism, Tragedy and Torment: Yaël Farber’s “Blood Wedding” at the Young Vic
Olwen Fouére (foreground) as the Mother in “Blood Wedding”. Photo: Marc Brenner. A Production posted on thetheatretimes.com. Yael Farber is an extraordinarily talented director of South African origin who presented her version of Mies Julie in Montreal in 2014.
Blood Wedding. Federico García Lorca’s rural trilogy, written in the period between 1932 and 1936 as social unrest increasing polarised Spain, canonised him as a dramatist outside his native country. But these three plays—Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba—merging the symbolic, the lyrical, and the realistic often pose significant challenges both to the translator and director in their striking shifts of dramatic register. Blood Wedding, the first of this trio of plays creates a modern Greek tragedy from the 1928 newspaper story of a pair of cousins—here the Bride and Leonardo—eloping on the eve of the bride-to-be’s wedding. First staged in Madrid in 1933, it is a play where the lean storyline and economical writing avoid easy exposition, allowing the narrative’s ambiguities to remain up to the play’s tragic end. …