Yerma

Simon Stone, in another of his rewrites (this one more radical) lifts Garcia Lorca’s peasant characters from rural Spain and transforms them into ‘aspirational’ middle-class people in contemporary London.  In an interview before the NTL screening, Mr Stone says, yes, he’s changed the source material, ‘but not the myth’.  I’m not sure what he means by the myth, nor what, really, is the motive behind the exercise.  Whatever he means and whatever the motive, this production was received in London with mostly rapturous reviews (there were reservations in some quarters) and the show quickly sold out.

The title character, Yerma (it means ‘barren’ in Spanish) becomes ‘Her’ (Billie Piper), but not, significantly, the active ‘She’, initially a early-30s lifestyle journalist and blogger for a metropolitan newspaper.  Her husband ‘Juan’ becomes John (Brendan Cowell), a financier-businessman.  The fertile friend Maria becomes the fertile sister Mary (Charlotte Randle) – a nice touch - and the happily childless woman becomes Des (Thalissa Teixeira), Her’s assistant.  Possible lover Victor becomes past lover Victor (John MacMillan) while Dolores (maybe) becomes Helen (Maureen Beattie), Her and Mary’s fastidious mother.  The number of Garcia Lorca’s characters is therefore reduced and the plot, in a way, is simplified – with an horrific but totally changed ending.

People get hot and bothered about Mr Stone’s rewrites, but that is more to do with his boastfully claiming originality.  A famous Australian playwright remarked publicly of him, ‘Write your own f**king plays’ – but Shakespeare, after all, stole the plots for just about all his plays.  Isn’t Hamlet a rewrite?  My attitude is to quell the irritation at this young fellow’s ego and ask, ‘Does it work?’  And if it does, it does.  It worked with The Wild Duck, but not so well with Death of a Salesman.  As for Yerma, Mr Stone has reduced the sense of fable and archaic mystery and replaced them with psychological complexity, employing an increasingly overwrought style to disguise the fact that, really, these are not especially sympathetic or even interesting characters.

Every member of the cast, however, is excellent with Ms Piper, in particular, winning a plethora of awards for the London production.  She is infinitely changeable, but an underlying desperation holds all the metamorphoses together until that desperation breaks out, takes over and breaks her.  Mr Cowell is the best I’ve ever seen him, giving us a layered ambivalent John, loving but selfish, dutiful but defeated.  It’s a slightly perilous marriage from the start: in their first scene, we learn that she has a shaved pudendum because he likes it that way and that she’s found out he’s been watching anal sex porn online.  Tsk, tsk.  Perhaps Her eagerness to please is a key to her character, giving rise to her sudden and surprising (to her) obsession with having a baby – an obsession that rules her and the play for the next hour and a half.

Robbed of the context of the original, the poverty, the rigid sex roles of a peasant community, of Catholicism and other superstitions, all that is left for Her is, we guess, a biological imperative reinforced by societal pressure – although there is scant representation of the latter in the play.  Her sister is no more than sympathetic, but no one else that we see appears to give a damn whether she has a baby or not.  Certainly not her mother!  John, in a howl of despair, reveals he only wanted Her to be happy and if that meant a child…  She uses her blog to write about her failure to conceive, about her jealousy when her sister conceives, about what it means to conceive – and her assistant Des, a scarily modern young woman (‘Was I f**ked last night?’) is gleeful at the responses.  Barren Her goes viral; she’s a media phenomenon.

As he did with his adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Mr Stone encases his actors in a glass box, working here with designer Lizzie Clachan (and a much bigger budget).  The glass walls surrounding the characters have been variously interpreted, but for me represent a place from which there is no escape and yet a place where the characters are under constant scrutiny – by us, the audience, and by the world the characters inhabit.  Does this box inhibit the sound?  There are times when fast-paced dialogue becomes mumbles and simultaneous dialogue aural mud. 

The glass box aside, this NTL production attempts to move as far as possible away from theatre and towards cinema – and I can’t help suspecting that this was at Mr Stone’s insistence.  Anyone who knows anything about theatre knows that inside that glass box the elaborate scene changes could not possibly be achieved quickly.  An expanse of white carpet becomes an expanse of grass becomes an expanse of soil and mud and back to carpet… What we get here, instead of us sitting in the theatre in the dark waiting, is quite deafening music and intertitles – big, upper case white letters on black, with such information as ‘THE NIGHT HE FOUND OUT’, or TWO DAYS LATER, or TWELVE YEARS LATER.  These intertitles were used in the live theatre production apparently – and with the same purpose – but here we are spared any longer interruptions.

A maxim of dramatic writing is that you can’t have a mad person as a protagonist (King Lear to the contrary – but is he the protagonist?).  Despite Ms Piper’s superb acting, which should be heartbreaking, as Her becomes increasingly dominated, controlled by her obsession, descending into a kind of madness, she recedes from us – as she recedes from the other characters.  We can sympathise, but with obvious exceptions (i.e. women who have had the same experiences), we can no longer empathise.  She gives us an exhausting, detailed and believable portrayal of this woman’s descent, but we end up wondering if the Stone version is worthy of it.  At the end, I remember thinking of Ms Piper, ‘the poor woman, having to give this performance night after night.’  At the curtain call, she appears totally wrung out.  

Michael Brindley