Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding is one of the 20th-century’s outstanding poetic dramas, and should not be approached lightly by any stage director. It requires a strong infusion of stage poetry to complement the poetry of the text, and this, I think, Simone Spiteri has done in her handsome production.
The acting style used by most of the cast is that of a realism sufficiently emphatic to colour the speech and actions of an unsophisticated community
The play is a tragedy of love and revenge, rushing from its seemingly joyful, but actually ominous, opening to its bloody ending and predictions of more suffering to come.
Spiteri tries to make sure that the audience has a good idea what to expect, by adding a new scene right at the start, in which a group of the Spanish peasants among whom the play is set appear in choreographic format. Each one bears two knives which they brandish and clash again and again, while a young girl sings a joyful wedding song, written by Lorca, for the play’s wedding scene.
The plot is about a young bride preparing to marry another man, even though she is still in love with her old lover, Leonardo, now a married man. During the wedding she and Leonardo escape through a forest but are overtaken by the bridegroom, thirsting for revenge.
The two men are killed in the duel, and the bride comes back to the community, confessing her guilt and asking for her own death.
The expressionist set, designed by Pierre Portelli, is dominated by a great oval crown of thorns placed on top of a structure resembling the Elizabethan theatre’s inner stage.
This structure lights up ominously in green or in red, revealing from time to time the figure of the beggar man who is actually a figure of Death. Death is played by Toni Attard, fearful at times, both physically and vocally, a chilling hunter of the play’s characters.
Then there are the scenes that are apparently cheerful, but that are leading surely to sorrow, such as that of the dancers during the wedding scene. Spiteri has used music very effectively. The violins in the stage boxes represent the forest (requested by Lorca himself) through which the bride is fleeing with her lover. They create a scene of great tension. In other scenes, Spanish dance motifs and more abstract music deepen the poetry of the dialogue and action.
Scene shifting is economical and elegant, the best example being the creation of a forest environment by the descent from the flies of elongated, tree-like structures. For the long, last scene dealing with the aftermath of the two men’s death, Spiteri and her designer have not stuck to Lorca’s instruction for a white, church-like image.
Again, Spiteri chose not to follow the script, by having the two men’s bloodied corpses brought in on stretchers and laid on the stage floor, while a chorus of youngsters sings a religious hymn and the other characters stand sadly around.
This, and the Crown of Thorns through which characters sometimes exit and enter, give the production a religious dimension certainly not explicit in the text, but definitely in keeping with the spirit of the conservative community seen in the play.
With the entrance of the bride (Ruth Borg), her white bride’s dress also heavily blood-stained, the bridegroom’s mother (Josette Ciappara, who holds the superbly stage in every scene she appears), who is the most powerful figure in the play, explodes in anger and has to be restrained from committing the killing of the bride that the latter has invited.
This last scene would have been much more compelling if Borg’s diction had been much clearer. Putting on a strongly lachrymose or wailing tone can be deadly to vocal clarity for those whose technique is weak, and this was especially unfortunate, as the bride is given darkly poetic things to say.
Ciappara’s well-projected diction, a fine expression of her powerful personality with its primitive emotions, rings beautifully clear and, together, with the very good ensemble playing of the other characters such as Leonardo’s wife (Chantelle Micallef-Grimaud) and the mother’s good neighbour (Lizzy Eldridge), enable the play to grip the audience until the curtain is drawn.
Micallef-Grimaud also plays well as the loving wife expecting disaster in the smaller scenes, such that with her mother-in-law, played with restraint by the excellent Ninette Micallef.
The acting style used by most of the cast is that of a realism sufficiently emphatic to colour the speech and actions of an unsophisticated community but not so much as to weaken the atmosphere of what is a great tragic play. In one case, the bride’s house-maid (Pia Zammit) is sometimes given a stylised manner that is amusing, but not excessively so.
Chris Galea is a sombre Leonardo and his love for the bride is of the fiercely intense kind, while David Persiva's bridegroom's love is joyfully open, changing to a murderous rage when the Bride elopes with Leonrado .
Looking more like a close relative than a servant, she chides the bride and Leonardo when he visits her before the wedding, seemingly forgetting she has previously told the girl she has seen Leonardo looking at the bride’s window during the night.
Lorca introduces two non-human personages in his script, that of Death as a beggar, and that of the Noon in the forest scene. I could accept Attard’s Death, unpleasant when pretending to be a beggar and fearful when he is revealed to the audience in his true nature, embodying the frequent presence of violent death in this community of knife-wielders.
On the other hand, Spiteri was too daring when she transformed Lorca’s moon, personified in the script as a woodcutter in the forest, into a pale female, goddess-like creature.
It is clear that Lorca’s moon is intended to be a denizen of the forest who, like many of the human characters, desires that the fleeing lovers be captured.
Spiteri’s Moon (poetically spoken by Marta Vella) had no kinship with the humans around her.
Spiteri’s direction of the ensemble scenes, like the celebratory wedding scene and the sombre one of the woodcutters in the forest forecasting bloodshed, is skilful and dynamic.
A final word: why have the mother and the mother-in-law been saddled with such very unbecoming wigs?