Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” was presented with telling effect.
Photo: Sandeep Saxena
IMPRESSIVE A scene from “Blood Wedding”.
Family feud and wild passions lead to an unbroken chain of murder and intense hatred. In this barbaric act men are killed and women are left to mourn their dead. This most shocking and tragic aspect of human destiny is revealed in Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” (1933) presented by Yatrik recently at India Habitat Centre with telling effect. Different versions of this play have been seen on the Delhi stage in the past. Yatrik’s production se
ems to capture the tragic vision of Lorca with poetic intensity that deeply stirs human soul. An ambience of doom and sombre lyricism is projected to heighten the tragic mood.
“Blood Wedding” form parts of Lorca’s trilogy, the other two are “Yerma” and the “House of Bernarda Alba”.
A Spanish poet and dramatist, Lorca’s trilogy is known as “rural tragedies”. These plays explore the tormented and sexually starved world of women living in a rigid society. The tone of these plays is bitter, the mood is painfully brooding. Among these three plays the “House of Bernarda Alba” is more frequently staged in Delhi.
Its Hindi version has also been filmed.
Simple but deep
Directed by Kusum Haidar, “Blood Wedding” tends to be a simple story on the surface which unfolds the story of a bride who runs away on the wedding day with her former lover.
The mother of the bridegroom provokes her son to pursue and catch hold of those who have broken the solemn conventional law about marriage and its sanctity.
He chases them deep into a dark and dense forest and a fierce knife combat ensues. The confrontation between the dramatis personae takes place against the backdrop of family feud and hatred between the family of bridegroom and the lover of bride.
Inner conflict
Except one character - Leonardo - all the characters have no names. The intense inner conflict of the characters make this play dramatically rich and the movements and actions of characters powerful and convincing which are characterised by a kind of spontaneity.
Director Kusum displays a fine visual imagination, embodying her production with scenic images remarkable for their symbolic meaning.
The wedding procession scene is beautifully composed.
Similarly the scene of forest where the young lovers are frantically pursued by the bridegroom with three wood cutters, moon and beggar woman, who symbolise mournful chorus, messenger of death and death itself respectively, pervades with gloom and haunting suspense.
The director has aptly handled offstage sounds to create the illusion of reality on the stage where a savage drama of murder, hate and revenge is being unfolded.
Brilliant acting
The cast gives a brilliant account of itself. Oroon Das as Leonardo, the lover who had married the cousin of the bride but passionately remembers his first love, invests his portrait with intense passion and obsession.
Seema Sarin, the bride is torn between her passion for her former lover and her loyalty for her bridegroom.
Overpowered by elemental passion, she runs away with her lover but she has not lost her sanity and duty towards her newly-wed husband. In the denouement when both her husband and lover kill each other, she comes back to her mother-in-law expressing her guilt with a tinge of pride when she says, “I am chaste, chaste as a newly born child”.
Ankana Bhalla as mother gives a penetrating revelation of her character’s complex world of hatred for the killers of her husband and her other son who belonged to the clan of Leonardo.
Her mother is constantly assailed by a brooding sense of calamity. Ranjit Mathur as a humiliated father and Shairi Mathur as neglected wife of Leonardo and Nikhil Murali as bridegroom give impressive performances.
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