Blood Wedding
By Federico García Lorca, translated by Ben Naylor and Paula Rodriguez / 2022, Embassy Theatre, Central / Directed by Ben Naylor and Natasha Fedorova / Set by Anisha Fields / Costume by Sarah Mercadé / Lighting by Ben Jacobs / Composition by Jon Boden and Lisa Knapp / Sound by Nat Norland / Intimacy and violence by Bethan Clark / Voice coaching by Robert Price / Assistant Director Nathalie Adam / Movement Assistant Mariana Camiloti / Equity and Inclusion Dramaturgy by Broderick Chow / Stage Management by Lucia Revel-Chion and Fiona Munro
This play has haunted me, somehow, from the very earliest days of my theatre career. As part of the first group of Genesis Directors at the Young Vic during David Lan’s extraordinary tenure, I was fortunate to participate in a workshop led by David around the turn of the millennium, working on the first scene of Ted Hughes’ spare, unforgiving and elemental translation.
At around the same time, I did some work developing a rather lovely play which never, I think, saw the light of day in a full production: Bernard Adams’ The Cadaques Charleston. Narrated by Federico Garcia Lorca, movingly from beyond the grave, it concerned the extraordinary 1920s menage of Lorca and Salvador and Gala Dali. One passage stuck with me particularly, in which Spain’s greatest modern playwright and poet recalled his own death, murdered during the first weeks of the Spanish Civil War in an Andalucian olive grove.
Retrospective threads. I wouldn’t have predicted then that more than twenty years later, Blood Wedding would be my final production at Central, the last piece in a jigsaw of Central shows of which I’m (perhaps too) proud, as I move on to a new professional environment. But it transpired that returning to this extraordinary play – somewhat by chance, as I had originally had Bulgakov’s Flight in my sights for the 2022 cohort – would result in perhaps the most complete of my Central productions. (Though even this comparative completeness was incomplete, as I never really solved the very final beat of the last scene.) Threads drawn tighter, snapping at the end.
I was, as I have always been at Central, profoundly blessed by my collaborators. The beauty of the work by Anisha Fields, Ben Jacobs and Sarah Mercadé can be seen in the pictures above; as can perhaps the precision and energy in the physical performances overseen by Natasha Federova and Bethan Clark. Jon Boden and Lisa Knapp created and directed an exquisite live vocal score, and Nat Norland’s sound was arresting and inventive; the brilliance of all of these and more collaborative inputs, and the fantastic ensemble performances of the actors, made this feel like a very suitable final act of the long (tragi-?) comedy of my time at Central.
My programme note read:
The play takes place in the mind of its author, and in a small rural community in Andalucia or elsewhere in the world, a few or many generations ago.
Rather than learning a prescribed speech system to represent this community, each of the actors is working with rural accents or dialects with which they have a personal connection, either of heritage, geography or association. The text of the play has been adapted to accommodate these choices. All of the accents are to be thought of as belonging to this community, and not ‘other’.
Shortly before five in the morning of 18th July 1936, in the early weeks of the Spanish Civil War, Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain’s greatest living poet and playwright, was murdered by Nationalist militia in an olive grove between Viznar and Alfacar, outside his home city of Granada.
The first and last lines of the note allude to the framing device we adopted: a devised sequence of the minutes before Lorca’s murder, his executioners played by the same three actors who would later appear as the Woodcutters in the expressionist third act (with the actor playing Lorca himself later doubling as the Moon). It was a moving and precise sequence, which gave enough to establish tone and emotional pregnancy at the top of the show, but kept enough back to avoid straying into mawkishness. It concluded with the sob-scream “Mother”, which is the first line and dominant hierarchical presupposition of the play itself.
In order to own this ancient-modern play as a 21st-century ensemble, we had to do some atavistic preparatory work. I asked the actors each to research their own most recent rural heritage, which for most meant reaching back a generation or two, but often involved encounters much further back. This brought them into personal or familial contact with the era of the play’s inspiration and composition, as well as unearthing stories – or rather, hearing them from the keepers of family memories – that might otherwise have remained untold. For most of the actors it was a moving exploration, and for some a troubling and complex one.
The question of identity is at the very forefront of thinking in contemporary actor training, which perhaps all boils down to a straightforward question which is fiendishly difficult to answer: at what point does the work of the actor become inappropriately appropriative? How close must the actor be in their work to their own heritage, or lived experience? It’s not a question I would attempt to answer on anything but a case-by-case basis, but it did seem to me in this climate that for the actors of the 22 cohort, research – food for the imagination – related to their own heritages would be a really useful tool to work with both for the show, and as a part of the foundation of their professional careers; a discovery for each of one of their manifold authenticities.
This approach also avoided another appropriative minefield in actor training: the accent, or “speech system”. Whether deploying accents with which you have no particular connection is appropriative is another question which doesn’t have an easy answer; but accent mimicry has, at least since Shakespeare, been a skill possessed by some actors and which is often very highly valued in English-language theatre. But not all actors can do all accents, and not all actors can do accents at all; the actors in the 2022 Central cohort came from a diversity of backgrounds which would have made the uniform assumption of a particular English-language dialect extremely challenging, and probably to the detriment of some of them.
The aim instead was for each actor to work with the speech system of the rural ancestry they were researching; while as is evident from the pictures the production was highly unified visually, there was no attempt to unify the speech systems into a singular aurality of ‘here’. This, I think, was contrary practice to that adopted in most productions of the play in English, which seek to establish an analogue for the Andalucian location through the deployment of a particular speech system; this may sometimes also then feed into the cultural setting (as in Marina Carr’s Irish-set version directed by Yael Farber at the Young Vic).
Having been inspired all those years ago by Ted Hughes’ spartan – though to my mind sometimes untheatrical – translation, I knew I wanted to keep close to the strange sparseness of the Spanish; but also that the actors’ ownership of the text was as always one of my principal aims and directorial tools. So, working from a brilliant literal translation by Paula Rodriguez, I built into the text ‘options’ by which the actors could choose between different versions of a line. Different syntactical or lexical choices could therefore by made in response to the particular habits of the speech system they were working with: “which feels better in your mouth?”, I kept asking. Though many of these choices of necessity became fixed, not all did; some actors made subtly different choices in different performances, sometimes as a conscious crafting process and sometimes subconsciously and in-the-moment.
To harmonise these different speech-systems required a visual and aural setting which was true to the world of the play, but inclusive of all this sonic diversity and its cultural suggestions. The scenography and costuming were simple and elemental, pre-contemporary and geographically indistinct, with elements suggestive of Catholic Europe, but also of the chador; of ancient Greek tragedy blended with modern folk-horror, and surrealism alongside hyper-realism. The music too occupied a suggestive space incorporating different folk traditions and modes, and the rituals we developed for the society – especially in the pre-wedding scene – were derived from a variety of sources, of any place and none particular, other than the world of this production.
There was one major twist in this production, albeit one which struck me so clearly as a reading of the text that I wasn’t even sure it wasn’t Lorca’s intention. In a shock-tableau at the conclusion of the second act, we saw the Bride, wild-eyed and desperate, savagely slaughtering the two men whose entitlement and acquisitiveness have compromised her selfhood so profoundly. This, of course, changed fundamentally the nature of the final scene, with the blood-soaked Bride, carrying the murder weapon, confronting the Mother and Neighbours to explain herself: it became a scene of confession, inevitably inflected by the possibility of revenge. This was the beat I never solved: what was the audience to imagine happening in the blackout immediately after the play concluded – a brutal revenge exacted by the Mother on the Bride, or the butchering of the Mother by all the other women assembled onstage, as a repudiation of her feud? Ultimately, I simply couldn’t make up my mind and tried to leave it open – perhaps better left that way; but the final beat was in the end one of defiance, as the women assembled onstage for the subsequent curtain call simultaneously removed the veils they’d worn for much of the play (the Woman Life Freedom protests recently having begun in Iran). The oppressive gender politics of Lorca’s fable of early 20th-century Andalucia became a vehicle for very current feminist comment and solidarity.
All photos by @camharle
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