Yerma (Barren in English) is a play which is derived from Lorca's tragic poem of the same name.
Yerma is a play by the Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca. It was written in 1934 and first performed that same year. The play tells the story of a childless woman living in rural Spain. Her desperate desire for motherhood becomes an obsession that eventually drives her to commit a horrific crime. Because of the time she is living in, she is expected to bear children. When she cannot, she is forced to measures that those in her society would view as extreme.
Although critics speculate that Yerma kills her husband in the end because he is a frugal, economically driven man who has no desire to have children, the play is indeterminate on this issue. She kills him at a hermitage, a religious place with the possibility of fertility. However he has already shown no desire to have children, so there is no evidence that he would have changed his mind at the festival.
This is a wonderful surreal visual experience and one that will be transcribed as an emotional ride as opposed to a usual bleak representation.
The Play was made into a film in 2001, directed by Pilar Távora and starring Aitana Sánchez Gijón.
This will be a studio production and as such will be an interesting small space interpretation.
Yerma is presented by special arrangement with Samuel French, Ltd
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CAST
Yerma
Rosina Reading
Juan
Damian Frendo
Maria | Veiled Wise Woman
Teya Simone
Mariposa
Dani Wain
Victor
Andrés Vallellano
Dolores
Kerry Newcombe
Encarnacion Dionisial
Sarah Crutwell
Concepcion
Alice Emily Gee
Manuela
Bex Mason
Brunhilda
Beverley Anthony
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Yerma, Lace Market Theatre: Review
In Spanish, the play’s title, "Yerma" means "barren". And it’s also the name of the central character. This is about a woman locked in a sterile peasant marriage whose desperate yearning for a child culminates in shocking and tragic violence.
When the play opens Yerma, married for two years but with no baby to show for it, uses verse to express her longing. And at intervals throughout the underlying realism of the play is heightened and intensified by poetry. The village women, who function in part as a chorus, frequently use it, bawdily and effectively.
But nowhere is the poetry conveyed as beautifully as it is in Yerma’s soliloquies. In this, and in all other respects, newcomer Rosina Reading’s performance is truly outstanding. She makes it starkly clear that her longing for motherhood is not just a matter of fulfilling social expectations; it’s a deeply personal one.
As tyrannical husband Juan – arguably, it’s he who’s the barren one – Damian Frendo gives a strong performance, albeit marred by over-careful and mechanical line delivery. Teya Simone is also effective as friend Maria, in bitter contrast to Yerma, successfully pregnant.
Although it’s ostensibly set in the early thirties, there’s a timelessness about the play. Director Michael Darmola, possibly too zealous in his cutting of sub-plot, has emphasised the peasant insularity and narrowness of the society depicted. He has also ensured that the earthy and elemental, pre-Christian pagan quality of the play is retained intact. Official Catholicism hardly gets a look in.
It wasn’t just for his sexual orientation that playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was brutally done to death by the Nationalists at the outbreak of the Civil War.
At just over the hour long, uninterrupted by an interval, and unencumbered by scenery, this studio production is a compelling experience from beginning to end.
Read the original article here.
"Yerma" by Federico Garcia Lorca
Nottingham Lace Market Theatre
Michael Darmola directs an amazingly powerful and intense piece of Spanish drama about a young woman who is longing for a child of her own while everyone else in the little Spanish town are raising children of their own. Yerma asks advice of the women of the town and is told to "try harder", but what she doesn't acknowledge is that the fault is not with her but with her selfish husband.
Rosina Reading puts in a passionate performance as Yerma, the "barren" one and she makes you feel the pain behind the longing to be a proper woman who bears children.
Yerma's husband, Juan, is played by Damian Frendo and is the best that I've seen him performance wise. He really makes you feel that you want to do to him what Yerma does at the end. Not giving it away there! Juan is selfish and only sees Yerma as having limited purpose in this one sided marriage.
Everyone involved gives very credible performances and will have you on the edge of your seat with the incredible intensity and passion in this play which only lasts just over 65 minutes.
Yerma is on at the Nottingham Lace Market Theatre until Saturday 4 July 2015 and is one play in Nottingham that I'd really recommend seeing this week.
Read the original article here.
Gareth Morgan reviews the play that shows what one desperate woman must when she finds herself trapped by circumstances
After the Lakeside’s recent production of Federico García Lorca's Amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa en su Jardin at Lakeside, it's now the turn of The Lace Market Theatre to get to grips with the Spanish playwright in their staging of Yerma. Written in 1934, Yerma is a tragic poem of a woman, the eponymous heroine, driven to desperation by her position in society and her callous and uncaring husband.
Upon learning that her husband may be the reason she has been unable to conceive, Yerma, desperate to have children, finds herself conflicted - will she rekindle with old lover Victor or partake in almost pagan fertility ceremonies in a final bid to become pregnant. With her life picked over by the bickering gossips of the town's washerwomen, Yerma retreats to a hermitage high in the mountains, a place to which many women unable to conceive have made a pilgrimage. When Juan confronts her there, revealing he values money over their having a son, things turn even more desperate and bloody.
This is a strong production, with Rosina Reading's Yerma leading the cast well - she is hardly ever off stage in the over-an-hour-long production. The strongest scenes are those between Yerma and her friend Maria, Teya Simone, in who the titular lead finds an equally strong foil, and in the appearances of Andrés Vallellano as the one who got away, Victor. Spaniard Vallellano gets the melodrama of the text and whilst some of the dialogue is lost in his accent and diction, he has a strong physical presence that tells of his yearning. Dani Wain's Mariposa is over-sexualised in her gestures and a bit too much of the sledgehammer symbolism whilst Damian Fredo makes for a stilted Juan.
The scenes are fairly well-directed but there's a heavy-handed lighting design and some under-thought through transitions, which if corrected could easily make the show flow better. Other sections feel rushed, especially the choral voices of the washerwomen, and letting them breathe would have given the production more poetry in their ensemble bickering.
Lorca's brand of "feminism" has not aged well, although an all-female production of the text might shed some new light on its positions. This said, read as an almost satirical allegory, we can see some of the pain of women in such positions, driven to radical means.
It's an enjoyable and ultimately bloodthirsty production which gains much from the immediacy of its traverse staging in the studio at the Lace Market Theatre. The tragedy unfolds before you at a grasping distance and that close liveness is one of the best things in it. There are some clunks and some misses but on the whole it’s a show which strips back much of the clutter to show, as unimpeded as possible, a woman standing on the edge.
Read the original article here.
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