Certain images recur again and again in the work of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca: moons, doves, flowers, sleepwalkers, dark rivers. There’s a symbolic quality to his work, a search for a deep language in which to articulate the experience of death, love, pain and desire, that director Diana Paolo Alvarado brings beautifully to the stage in her recent production of BLOOD WEDDING, playing at Flight Path Theatre until August 3.
For a story that takes place in early-twentieth century rural Spain at a time of land dispute and tribal factionalism, BLOOD WEDDING feels incredibly contemporary in Alvarado’s hands. This may partly be a consequence of the script itself, which is just as much about the class and gender politics of a changing rural Spain as it is about certain universal themes: the destructiveness of love and eros, the conflict between individual desire and communal responsibility that leads to the tragic ironies of the play’s end.
But, trained as a movement artist at the Royal Central School in London (she is both director/producer and the intimacy and movement coordinator here), Alvarado adopts an approach to space and the body in the play that also helps make her production feel fresh. The cast are in constant movement throughoutevery scene – dressing and undressing in front of us, retreating to or emerging from the edge of the stage where each of them stands in silent witness for the whole runtime (I thought this was an especially excellent creative choice by Alvarado, not only a means of capturing the collective responsibility of the community in BLOOD WEDDING but also a nod to the classical idea of tragedy as an act of shared witness in which the audience themselves is involved). Space, too, is continually being reformed, with the cast coming forward from the wings between each scene to reinvent the stage by pushing one of its only instruments of set design – two wooden panels that look a little like upright shipping crates – backwards or forwards.
The careful choreography involved in all of this is itself something to admire, but this minimalist, body-driven style of theatre is also a beautiful fit for Lorca’s narrative. Stripping down the space and training our eyes on the strangely-lit bodies of the characters – Bride, Groom, Mother, Maid and all the rest of them – as they sob or sing or dance, Alvarado draws out the play’s deep-seated symbolic meanings like a thorn. The lovers are doomed, the wives and mothers will suffer, the dark river of desire will go on running and the women’s sad lullabies will continue to be sung (“We should not forget,” wrote Lorca, in his lecture on Spanish lullaby, “that the cradlesong is invented by the poor women whose children are for them a burden, a heavy cross frequently impossible to bear”. One of the most moving moments in the production is The Wife’s delivery of Lorca’s lonely, strange cradlesong to her infant child, which is kept, to beautiful effect, in the original Spanish). It’s hard to distinguish a production of a play as well-known and frequently performed as this one; harder still to bring it to life to a contemporary Anglophone audience. But Alvarado’s handling of the tragic symbolism at the heart the original is utterly intuitive. It’s a re-telling that will leave those who know Lorca and those who’ve never encountered the play equally moved.
Production photography by Kirsty Semaan @spbyks
