Feedback:

"A bold choice played with raw energy and abandon. The audience was swept away." Cambridge Evening News

"Thanks VERY much for this production. The students are still talking about it and are referring to it now we are reading 'Blood Wedding' and making comparisons. Thanks for a superb production."
Head of Drama

"The feedback from education groups who came to see this production was very positive indeed. We look forward to welcoming the company back in the near future."
Education Manager, Cambridge Arts Theatre

Production notes:

Rehearsing a translation - however fine - poses a special challenge. Lorca's use of language, famously dense with metaphor and imagery, inevitably loses some of its essence in translation - in the same way as it is hard to imagine any language but English doing full justice to Shakespeare. At times we found that some of the play's more obscure Andalusian references must remain beyond our grasp.

But this is not a whinge - or an apology. We have relished the challenge of YERMA - a play which reveals a little more with every reading. And, like Shakespeare, or Ibsen, or Chekhov, it is Lorca's story-telling which transcends all linguistic nuance and makes his plays endure.

Our immensely creative cast and our tremendous Flamenco specialists have, we hope, led us somewhere close to Yerma's world as Lorca intended.

Yerma's story - which must resonate in any society - is her desperate desire to have a child - a desire which, through its denial, becomes an unhealthy obsession and ultimately her undoing.

Lorca clearly blames Yerma and her husband Juan's childlessness on their mismatch - an arranged marriage with no passion at its heart. Juan's preoccupation with his sterile masculine world of work and profit is contrasted starkly with the shepherd Victor's love of nature and empathy with women - particularly Yerma, his friend from youth. Through subtle but repeated suggestion that Victor and Yerma's union was the one nature intended, the real tragedy unfolds.

Yerma's childless domestic prison is made all the more hellish by the gossipy eyes and ears of rural peasant society all around her, presuming her guilty of loving where she ought not - though she is innocent.

Students of Lorca must question whether the shockingly violent end to which this deeply nurturing woman is driven is an expression of the playwright's own grinding frustration at being an outsider trapped in an rigid, traditionalist society.

Sally Woodcock

Download the A5 promotional poster (PDF file, 114KB)