Successful update of a tragic classic

Buenos Aires Herald, Tuesday, 5 June 2012.

García Lorca’s Yerma,

by Andrew Graham-Yooll

for the Herald

For theatre-goers of a certain age, mention Federico García Lorca’s play Yerma (1934) and not a few refer to the dramatic performance of Spanish actress Nuria Espert whose company staged the piece in 1971. The show, though only 40 years ago, was ground-breaking because of the defiance entailed: that opening happened when the “generalissimo” Francisco Franco was finally admitting he could not outlive an elephant.  What people probably remember as much was that Espert (1935) flipped open her clothes on stage to reveal some very white flesh while the ancient monster’s censors were still around. That too was defiance.

In conversation with the actress Malena Solda, who plays Yerma in the new staging at the Cervantes Theatre (Av. Córdoba and Libertad, tickets at 50 pesos), she shrugged off the reference to Nuria Espert heard several dozen times. The drama opened last Thursday and plays Thursdays through Sundays during June. Try to see it, you will be richly rewarded. Solda, and director Daniel Suárez Marzal obviously, wanted to show that a new Yerma was possible and could still be relevant.  It is. Malena Solda, at times waif like for such a powerful role, shows a deeply distressed character trying to produce the child that a backward rural Spanish society expects of her.  García Lorca presents a woman who feels that her mission in life is to bear a child. The pain of her failure might prompt the thought that the subject is out of date in today’s post-yuppie society. It is not. 

Yerma, which in Spanish means uninhabited, bare soil, barren in the case of the young woman in the play, is married to Juan (played by Sergio Surraco), an ambitious sheep farmer whose father arranged their marriage. For her it is a loveless match.  She only wants children from her spouse, to reproduce like the other women in the village.  Juan cannot conceive, he is not interested in having children. Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) sets several timeless critical points: one, that it is the man’s impotence that thwarts the woman’s desire for a child. We understand the woman to be fertile, whereas the conviction in a bygone society – especially in a close, backward and remote rural group –  put the weight of failure to conceive on the woman, not on the man.  It is Yerma’s sense of honour that prevents her getting laid with passing merchants or minstrels in a gypsy fair, or even seeking the contribution of an old flame (Victor, played  by Pepe Monje) who had once made her skin tingle.  She wants her unloved husband to deliver. The clash within her is one of instinct versus repression. A woman without child is only a scrap of humanity, she says. She does not envy the other women in the village, she says, she is burdened by a sense of poverty, a feeling that clashes with the material comfort her husband offers her. In her frustration, Yerma kills her husband and in her fantasy the dead man in his infertility becomes her son. This scene, at the end, is difficult, because Yerma finishes off the lad rather quickly.
         Malena Solda is great, and there is no quibble, but she seems a frail figure and would have sounded better if she could have expressed her indignation at the unfairness of fate with greater force.

        García Lorca’s symbolism comes across strongly as he resorts to sense and surroundings to depict fecundity betrayed.  The rain is at once cleansing and a cause of fertility, as is the woman’s daily pilgrimage to the village fountain where her fingers draw ripples of life. The warm milk she wants to feel flowing from her breasts represent maternity and the flowers she sees growing in the garden celebrate absent joy.  Another point for debate is Yerma’s virtual rejection of the idea of children as a product of love: they are the biological product of her body, the right and duty of woman, a physical necessity.  To transpose Yerma into modernity inevitably prompts controversy over whether a woman, a couple, who do not want children are “normal” or not, a spurious argument, and whether or not those couples who seek the assistance of expensive fertility drugs, test tubes and rented wombs are right to do so in an attempt to counter nature’s dictates.

García Lorca read excerpts from his play for the first time in March 1934 in Buenos Aires at a PEN writers’ association conference and dedicated the reading to actress Lola Membrives (1888-1969).  The show opened with a low profile but with a great actress, Margarita Xirgu (1888-1969), in December 1934 in Madrid, where the piece was seen as an advocacy for maternity.  Later, after García Lorca’s murder in 1936, Yerma was taken to Mexico, where it played to the exile Republican community, who saw in it a political statement of rebellion more than the intensely human drama the author had portrayed.  Other great Spanish actresses who have been Yerma include María Casares (1922-1996) and Aurora Bautista (1935), which meant Malena Solda, at 35, was competing against a formidable first division when she opened last Thursday. She played well.

The play is an enjoyable spectacle in spite of the tragedy, with Flamenco music (Sebastián Espósito), dancing (Maribel Herrera, directed by Omar Saravia) and song (Geromo Amador), emphasizing the remoteness and the tradition.  In the 90 minute show, director Suárez Marzal, who trained long and hard in Andalucía where he learned about flamenco and the gypsy world, at times had over thirty actors on stage, most of them quite young, which adds to the challenge and the pleasure of success.  Do see Yerma, it’s good stuff.