Blood Wedding
by Federico Garcia Lorca
Federico Garcia Lorca - Blood Wedding
BBC Radio 3: Drama on 3
Broadcast: Sunday 25th November 2007 @ 8:00 p.m.
On a summer night in 1936, Spain's most celebrated modern poet / playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca (only 38-years-old), was
executed by fascist thugs at the onset of the Spanish Civil War. Just three years earlier, Lorca had dramatised another summer night
filled with the high conflicts of passion, tradition, and blood feuding in his extraordinary play, "Blood Wedding". Lorca's masterwork is a
retelling of the fact-based story of a doomed wedding in the peasant region of Andalusia. In it, he uses his powerful poetic insights, his
immense sensitivity and compassion, to explore the forces of human need in all of their subtle nuances. Can the bride choose her
groom over the simmering love of her youth? Can strong traditions and bloodlines be overwhelmed by brooding sensuality? A master
of theatrical language, Lorca draws upon the expressive power of poetic imagery, colour symbolism, lighting, and music to illuminate
the articulate desires of the play's key figures.
The story is based on a newspaper fragment which told of a family vendetta and a bride who ran away with the son of the enemy
family. Lorca uses it to investigate the subjects which fascinated him: desire, repression, ritual, and the constraints and commitments of
the rural Spanish community in which the play is rooted. Ted Hughes's version stays close in spirit and letter to the original Spanish.
With marvellous directness, he fuses Lorca's vision to his own, and the result is a powerful poetic text which captures all the violence
and pathos of the play for an English-speaking audience.
A passionate story of forbidden love, Ted Hughes translates and adapts Lorca's 20th-century classic for an English-speaking
audience. His captivating version of the 1933 play premiered at the Young Vic Theatre, London, in September 1996.
With Barbara Flynn [The Mother], Carl Prekopp [The Bridegroom / A Woodcutter], Sarah Smart [The Bride], William Ash [Léonardo],
Andrea Risborough [Léonardo's Wife / One of the Girls], Ellie Haddington [The Mother-in-Law / The Servant], David Fleeshman [The
Father], Sam Curtis [A Woodcutter], Chris Hannon [ A Woodcutter], Claire Benedict [The Moon], Mary Cunningham [The Beggar
Woman / The Neighbour], Liz Carter [One of the Girls], and Daisy Jones [The Little Girl].
Original music composed by Matthew Wood.
Directed by Pauline Harris in Manchester.
90 min.
Jim
