Sydney Reviews

Verbally luxuriant, although some of the poetry is, alas, lost in translation, Lorca’s ninety year old play, Blood Wedding, precariously prone to immersion in romantic tragedy, gets a full dunking in Diana Paola Alvarado’s production at Flight Path Theatre.

On entry to the performance space, audiences are met with an ensemble in their smalls. What creative choice underpins the actors begin the show in their underwear alludes me.

We witness actors limbering, interacting with each other, preening, warming up, before they don their character’s clothes and retreat to the walls of the space to become witnesses themselves as two of them take centre stage to finally task the text.

Chekov’s gun becomes Lorca’s knife, produced as a centre piece of conversation between mother and son, a portent of tragedies past and future.

Lorca lays his scene in unfair Andalusia, where ancient grudge lies like a stone around a mother’s heart, her sole surviving son smitten by the offspring of a family foe. Nuptials never looked more like imminent annulment. 

Killing with dirk and dagger seems to be the go with these macho men of Andalusia, mourned over by mothers and wives who are just as guilty as propagating blood feuds as the boys.

Knives make widows of wives, blades bleed out husbands and fathers, feuds fought overwrought with edged weapons; grudge, rancour and resentment threatens.

Playing like four funerals and a wedding, the show is steeped in a sick cycle of revenge, the nuptial vow of death us do part fast tracked in misguided honour honed homicide. The continuance of the parent’s rage only brings strife from the knife, their folly can’t strive to mend.

Ninety years on this ninety minute play of stabbing knives and scolded wives, of runaway bride and wounded male pride has an all too familiar resonance.