"Theatre" Federico Garcia Lorca once wrote, "cannot be anything other than emotion and poetry". Both bloom in abundance in this, the second play in Lorca's rural trilogy, written in 1934 and given a brittle but meltingly sensual airing in Frank McGuinness' new translation. It's a tension taken up by director Helena Kaut-Howson.
Yerma inhabits a world of unbending contrast: where she is black and white, the other women of her village flower in blood reds and new leaved greens, chattering like starlings around Yerma's empty nest.
Yerma's desire for a child is sun and moon to Lorca's play, which traces her yearning from its impossibly moving beginnings to the violent madness of its end.
Kaut-Howson makes as many brilliant decisions with this highly stylised text as she does inexplicable ones. The scene in which the women wash their smocks in a river, smacking out their unspoken conflict on the wet rocks, is utterly mesmerising, and Lilja Blumenfeld's detailed design is as eloquent as Lorca's dialogue. But the religious and racial divisions in the staging make pressingly little sense. Why the Christian story should be set in Muslim North Africa, where a highly sexed black population writhes around a repressed white village remains a troubling, distracting mystery. But Kathryn Hunter's Yerma is so suffused with coiled, thwarted emotion she all but overflows, and Antonio Gil Martinez's frustrated Juan is equally devastating.
With a central relationship this achingly real, and poetry this rich and beautifully rendered, it's ultimately impossible to resist the barbed charms of this heart-wrenching production.
Viva Lorca: Yerma
Arcola Theatre
Arcola Street, E8 2DJ
