Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated and directed by Iain Sinclair. Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, August 5 – September 11, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
August 8
Perhaps you expect me to write about Lorca, but this is more than adequately done in the program. No, it is Iain Sinclair I must write about.
Thanks, Iain, for the poetry, the myth-making, for revivifying my memories of Lorca. Thanks especially for Leah Purcell in the central role of The Mother. “I believe very strongly in the Aboriginal spirituality. I believe in my ancestors and I believe that they have given me my ability to be a storyteller, a song woman, a performer.” (ABC TV Australian Story 2002)
The first Act is the story leading to The Mother’s only surviving son, The Groom (Kenneth Spiteri), marrying The Bride (Sophie Ross) who rides off on The Horse with her first love, now married Leonardo (Yalin Ozucelik) before the wedding reception has ended.
Act 2 is the search for the eloping couple in the forest. The Groom and Leonardo stab each other to death, while The Bride, still a virgin, returns, expecting retribution and death. But it is men who kill, not women, and the play ends leaving The Wife of Leonardo (Zindzi Okenyo), The Bride and The Mother all tragically bereft with no future beyond the “thick walls” of their peasant farmhouses.
The story has the epic proportions of Greek tragedy, and has a parallel in the Aboriginal story of the Two Wise Men and the Seven Sisters (A creation story from the WONG-GU-THA, people of the desert near Ooldea, South Australia, as told by Josie Boyle http://www.kitezh.com/sevensisters/7sisters.htm#A12 ).
It has the metaphorical and sexual implications of blood, reminiscent of D H Lawrence. It has the eerie faerie presence of death like the Irish playwright J M Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows. Lorca was clearly conscious of being one among the artists of his time, writing in 1933 of “Duende … This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzche’s heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding it, and without seeing that the duende he pursued had leapt from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz and the headless Dionysiac scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.”
So, true to Lorca’s art, Iain Sinclair’s production of Blood Wedding is not a dramatic retelling of the plot but an original creation of the mystery in the translation from the Spanish into Australian English, in the imagery of the Andalucian peasant farmers, in their music, rhythm and dance, and in the mysterious spirit figures of the forest. The play takes on the mantle of all the ancient rituals of death and transfiguration, written only a few short years before Lorca’s own execution in 1936 by fascists as Franco’s regime re-established dictatorship after a brief period of a democratic Spanish republic.
Go to this production not as a spectator but to absorb all the feelings – of terror, of joy, of tragedy – that Sinclair makes available to you. You may come away from Leah Purcell’s final scene shaken, out of complacency and into new understanding of the human condition. Thanks, Iain Sinclair, for making my kind of theatre.
