Blood Wedding

Perhaps it’s the number of antique doors encircling Franciso Rodriguez-Wile’s attractive set that prompts director Bronagh Lagan to cross so many dramatic thresholds in this production. The trouble is that little of Lagan’s interpretation really hangs together. In fact, that central gimmick serves more as a barrier that refuses to let the poetry of Lorca’s great tragedy out to play. It’s a rather bitter irony.

Part of the problem with all the bells and whistles, the interpretive dance and body paint, is that the show sometimes forgets the beautiful simplicity of its story – sourpuss mother prepares lily-livered son to marry ungrateful daughter of neighbouring farmer in Madrid, circa 1933. Daughter loves someone else, Leonato, a muscle-bound brute who storms around shouting until he gets his way and we are thrust headfirst into a limb-maiming combine harvester of inevitable bloodshed.

True, Lorca masterfully wove surrealist imagery into this tale, such as the delicious thought of a moon who delights in the downfall of the lovers she bathes, but that in no way justifies the all-singing miasma of self-indulgence we get here. The cast does its best to salvage something, particularly Miles Yekinni as a menacing Death who slithers around the stage like an asp, but it’s all in vain.