A gripping take on Lorca’s Yerma shot through with ribald humour makes for a concentrated amalgam of high drama and low comedy in Patrick J O’Reilly’s new adaptation, presented by Tinderbox Theatre Company at the Lyric Theatre for the Belfast International Arts Festival.
Premièred in 1934, Yerma’s locking of antlers with the hidebound censoriousness of then conservative Spain overlorded by a domineering Catholic Church may have led, his biographer, Dubliner Ian Gibson, has suggested, to the assassination of the openly homosexual playwright—another apparently complicating factor—two years later.
As such, its portrait of a society whose politics are polluted and lives confined by religious dogma remains all too recognisable and pertinent in a Northern Ireland still striven by sectarian friction.
In O’Reilly’s relocation to the Irish border’s rural hinterland, where the past is struggling to catch up with the present, there is a palpable frisson to be felt as developing social attitudes and entrenched matters of morals remain in a constant tug-of-war with each other.
In substituting sweltering Hispanic heat for the inclement environs of borderland Ireland—“this shitty wasteland”—what Lorca’s “tragic poem” loses in poetic character, it gains in the robustness of O’Reilly’s apposite setting, lacing religious pre-eminence with pagan precedent. It’s a neat and telling inversion of an Irish trope to substitute a wake for a christening.
At its heart is the titular Yerma, her name deriving from the Spanish word for “barren”. Longing for a child of her own while her younger sisters are laden down with offspring, Caoimhe Farren begins with nonchalant indifference and ends in gut-wrenching anguish. It’s a performance of admirable nuance and considerable strength, and one of the finest seen on Northern Irish stages this year.
She receives vivid support from sisters Hazel Clifford, Niamh McAllister and Sophie Robinson—veritable harpies afflicting Yerma’s increasing sense of isolation—and Laura Hughes’s Mammy, adroitly shape-shifting to accommodate her brood’s multiple claims for attention while wielding earth-mother authority.
As the luckless men caught in the midst of hormonal mayhem, Stefan Dunbar’s unreconstructed, soil-rooted husband John and Matthew Forsythe’s might-have-been suitor Victor respectively provide salt and sugar to Yerma’s un-sated hunger.
Tracey Lindsay’s set is a textbook example of making much from little: a single car transforming into a veritable magic box of tricks, actors disappearing into its innards and appearing again, the vehicle itself transforming as scenes change. It’s an audacious idea brilliantly executed.
The variegated moods of Mary Tumelty’s lighting and Garth McConaghie’s crafted sound design adroitly chart the mounting emotional temperature, Mary-Ellen O’Hara’s casting gifting O’Reilly, who directs with flair and feeling, with a cast that creates a tightly bonded and integrated ensemble to frame Farren’s stand-out performance.
Following O’Reilly’s reworking of Ionesco’s Rhino—winner of the Best Play Revival at this year’s UK Theatre Awards—Yerma cements Tinderbox’s reputation for resurrecting European classics in new stagings as imaginative as they are illuminating.