"Blood Wedding". Oxford Playhouse. Review by Victoria Tayler

Woodchoppers, death in the guise of a woman, and a character who is the literal moon: Blood Wedding is one strange play. What is so seductive about Full Moon Theatre’s new adaption is that it confronts the weirdness head-on, meeting it with vivacious acting and a bold willingness to explore García Lorca’s embattled ideas about love.  

Federico García Lorca’s ‘Bodas de sangre’ or Blood Wedding is the story of a rural wedding turned murder mob in twentieth-century Spain. The nameless Bridegroom (Gilon Fox) opens the production starry-eyed about his bride (Thalia Kermisch) and absorbed in a future fantasy of family, land ownership and rosy romance. With dumb hope, he navigates the sometimes scathing reproaches of his mother (Siena Jackson-Wolfe) and the bubbling rumours about extant affection between the bride and her ex-lover Leonardo (Gillies Macdonald), until their wedding day sees the fantasy crumble into dust. Leonardo and the runaway bride escape on horseback, and are pursued by members of the town, who have shed their exuberant hospitality, and are bent on revenge killing. The second half dissolves into dream-like (more accurately: nightmarish) visions of violence as the runaway pair agonise over their decisions, all under the mocking eye of personified death and the haunting watch of the personified moon.  

This production rises to the challenge of the surreal allegory and darkness in this play. It’s played at the level of the cerebral, not the material: all magnetism, seduction, hamartia. Many a production has leaned on the play’s chilling historical context, as a text composed on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, to give Blood Wedding its bite. Indeed, it is tempting to read Blood Wedding as a play primarily concerned with machismo, violence, honour killing, vigilante justice. But this performance strikes a different note. Translator Emma Nihil Alcorta knows how to write with edge without suffocating her audience in heavy-handed detail. Blood Wedding is not outrageously violent, but it has all the necessary elements to remain lethal and suspenseful, and the violence looms in the audience’s imagination long before it arrives on stage. The translation oscillates between the beautiful and the blunt, sometimes poetic and sometimes modern: it’s a view of love we can recognise, even in a setting we can’t. Alcorta’s pure sense of taste makes other translations read like stuffy, medieval imitations of the real thing.  

Translation is more than a matter of words, Blood Wedding speaks in images. The Spinners cut through the midst of the violence in matching blue dresses, an echo of “The Shining” about them: something spooky and metaphysical is afoot. The play flits between emblematic and psychological visions of horror. The knife fight between Leonardo and The Bridegroom feels like a dance in one moment and a Martin Macdonoughue fight scene in the other, complete with all the gritty, bodily struggles. When it finally ends, it’s completely deflating and hopeless, and Thalia Kermisch feels like the incarnation of the audience as she staggers off stage wounded and in tears.  

Other moments spring to mind. The dance of the wedding guests is gorgeously choreographed and perfectly joyous, a vision of a jovial world which our bride and her illicit lover linger but will inevitably be banished from. When our bride brushes off her newly wedded husband, her horror is so tangible, and his barely concealed devastation so clear. His embarrassed attempts to shrug off the concerns of his guests and convince himself that all is well is far too familiar to anyone who’s ever been scorned in love.

And yet there’s humour in it. The woodcutters (Ollie Gillam, Noam Sala Budgen, Ezana Betru) play a sort of shrugged-shoulders banter which is a surprising source of hilarity in such a dark play (“No. They’ll kill ‘em”). Jackson-Wolfe is somehow able to play the mother with the perfect balance of half-hearted, comical chiding, and all-out grieving rage: not an easy balance for such a traumatised and self-protective character. And Rohan Joshi is pure comedy: grandiose, unserious, delusional. Of course, he’s helped along by a glorious voice.  

On the subject of glorious voices, one has to make a special mention for Rebekah Devlin, escaping Exeter choral practice to play the maid for this production. A combination of soaring voices and stunning choreo sweeps the audience through the highs of this production, and dangles us over the edge, fretfully anticipating the lows.  

In a production of such sophistication, one hopes for slightly better production value. Forgive me if this sounds a little pantomime, but I do think this show would benefit from a few strategically placed fake blood sachets. Though the outfits precaked with red lends an allegorical, doomed-from-the-start sort of feel to García Lorca’s production (which thematically makes sense), there’s a kitschiness to it which just doesn’t match up with the sheer professionalism of the acting and directing. Death, or the Beggar Woman, is channeling Matthew Bayton’s Dick Turpin in a black and gold waistcoat, more highwayman than metaphor. Sometimes the effect is perfectly nightmarish, other times we stray dangerously close to the ASDA halloween aisle. Such weaknesses do not detract from the explosive force of the production, but such a strong performance demands the technicality to match: it certainly deserves it.