Tag: Susan Hilferty

Blood Wedding at the Young Vic review ****

Blood Wedding

Young Vic, 11th October 2019

I got a bit nervous going into this. For those who don’t know, South African director Yael Farber has a certain style, an aesthetic, and approach to interpretation of classic plays, which isn’t too everyone’s taste. For me it works. Mies Julie, Knives in Hens, Les Blancs, even the much derided Salome at the NT, all drew me in. Very satisfying. We have her take on Hamlet also at the Young Vic to look forward to next year and newbie, the Boulevard Theatre, has lined her up to direct her compatriot, Athol Fugard’s, Hello and Goodbye.

For Blood Wedding though I had roped in the SO, a more forbidding critic, who is not, as most chums rightly are, as tolerant as the Tourist of, shall we say directorial longueurs. And this was near 2 hours straight through. On the benches of the Young Vic main space. And with her back playing up.

As it turned out I had nothing to fear. Lorca’s play, (his day job was poet after all), has a mythic and elegiac quality perfectly suited to Ms Farber’s ethereal approach, though this tale of forbidden love and revenge is not without drama and lends itself to a clear feminist interpretation. All this and more was on show at the Young Vic. A barely there, in the round, set design from Susan Hilferty, with occasional visual declamation via doors on one side, some artful cascades and a rope and harness which permitted muscular bad boy Leonardo (Gavin Drea) and absconding (nameless) Bride (Aoife Duffin) the striking means to pretend gallop. The intervention of the symbolic Moon (Thalissa Teixera), who can now add superb flamenco singing to her acting flair, and woodcutters (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva and Faaiz Mbelizi) made perfect, just about, sense. The bold lighting of Natasha Chivers, the score of Isobel Waller-Bridge, the spectral hum of Emma Laxton’s sound design, the balletic movement of Imogen Knight, witness the closing fight (overseen by Kate Waters) and subsequent requiem.

Most of all though Marina Carr’s beautiful translation. By shifting the setting of Lorca’s revenge tragedy to rural Ireland, though never quite leaving 1930’s Andalusia behind, Ms Faber allowed Ms Carr the opportunity to conjure an English language translation which was sympathetic to the poetry, metaphor and idiom of the Spanish original. A colonised Irish interior, suppressed by Church and State, bears obvious similarities to the paralysed, benighted Spain that Lorca delineated, critiqued and celebrated in his rural trilogy (Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba as well as BW). The hybrid setting also allowed the natural casting of the magnificent Olwen Fouere as the grizzled, austere Mother and the equally magnificent Brid Brennan as the Weaver. If I tell you that Annie Firbank as the Housekeeper and Steffan Rhodri as the outraged Father also graced the stage, along with relative newcomers Scarlett Brookes, (watch her closely in future) as Leonardo’s spurned wife and David Walmsley as the equally wronged Groom, then you can see that this was a grade A cast top to toe.

Lorca’s story is straightforward. Mother reminds son (the Groom) that his Dad and Bro were killed by the men of the Felix family next door. A dispute over land. Leonardo Felix and the Bride are still in love. Mrs Leonardo knows. The Mother finds out as well but decides to visit the Bride and her Dad. The wedding goes ahead by Leonardo turns up and steals the Bride. Outrage. Vengeance. Fight. Deaths. Sacrifice. It is very heady stuff but its chimerical qualities mean it is a long way from melodrama or even Greek tragedy. Closer to fable.

Anyway Yael Farber and Marina Carr have done a little nip and tuck with the plot but all the primitive elements are still there. That this is a traditional, brutally patriarchal society is never in doubt, as much but what the older women say, as the men, and yet there is still a sense of agency in the striking performances of Aoife Duffin and Scarlett Brooks. There is intentional comedy in the vernacular passages and there is no unintentional comedy in the brutal and fantastical scenes, (though once or twice it skirts close near the end – it is the women who mop up the blood). The cumulative effect is undeniably powerful even when the pace edges towards the, shall we say, Largo. In fact there is something of the minor key symphonic in Yael Farber’s reading.

I am not sure I would recommend this to fans of the Lion King or indeed anyway unfamiliar with this deliberately stylised auteur approach to theatre. On reflection I shouldn’t really have worried about the SO’s reaction. She reads books. Proper books. Lots of them. We are drowning in theme. Imagination, to augment the visual abstraction, is therefore no limitation for her.

Salome at the National Theatre ***

salome-olivier-285

Salome

National Theatre, 5th July 2017

Salome, much like Common also currently residing on the Olivier stage, has been given a bit of a pasting by the criterati. Not utterly trashed but its obvious flaws have been highlighted. And much like Common I have to say I think the criticism is a little misplaced (Common at the National Theatre review ***.

The text is ponderous, with a strange mix of bombastic Biblicality, overwrought imagery and sometimes vague, paradoxical didacticism but the themes are still revealed and once you adjust to the style and pacing it exerts a sort of spell. Yael Farber has directed some cracking theatre, not least the NT’s Les Blancs on this very stage last year. She is not afraid of bashing you over the head with the messages she whats to convey and is the antithesis of theatrical reserve. Having set out to direct Wilde’s version of the Salome “story” she found that the truth of that “story” had been revised, reviled and distorted at the hands of the unholy trinity of history, religion and patriarchy. So, following a bout of impressive scholarship, she set out to write her own version.

Nameless (our Salome in her dotage), played with sonorous venom by Olwen Fouere, acts as our “narrator” as we are introduced to Judea c. AD 26. Cue flashback. Pontius Pilate is whinging about getting the gig here, the Pharisees are getting all orthodox and hanging on to their cash. Herod (there were a few of them) is swanning about as vassals do and getting all lathered up about his niece who may be Salome. John the Baptist pitches up, berating everyone in Aramaic (I assume) for being insufficiently hairshirt. Authorities decide to lock him up rather than crucify to stop the hoi-polloi turning nasty. Dance, head, plate, end. But the crafty Salome/Nameless and John B have outwitted the Roman occupier for martyrdom and revolt are the consequence.

Ms Farber, through the shouty stuff, shows that the whole Salome myth was laid on top in subsequent centuries and gives a flavour of these fervent times when monotheistic religions was developing. And it looks and sounds spectacular courtesy of Susan Hilferty and Adam Cork respectively. Renaissance art comes to life. I know that set, sound, movement. lighting, costume and other visual flummery is not enough on its own to justify a trip to the theatre but this comes mighty close. The singing of Yasmin Levy and Lubana Al Quntar was spell-binding. And the multi- nationality cast largely gives a full-throated bash at delivering even the most pretentious twaddle. In particular I was taken with Lloyd Hutchinson’s Pilate, the aforementioned Olwen Fouere, and especially Ramzi Choukair’s Iokanaan (the Baptist to you and me). 

So yes it is all a bit elliptical, it is trying too hard to be good for you and the text is undeniably orotund (I bloody love that word) but it has a hazy, mystical quality which I think suits the “action” such as it is. Myth and ritual are central to any conception of art and the ideas here do eventually penetrate the fog, particularly the tragedy of occupation and the masculinisation of history through the metaphor of the female body. So I say good on ya, Yael and don’t let the bastards grind you down.