Blood Wedding, by the Spanish dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, is one of those heavyweight tragedies that risks looking a bit ridiculous when you take it out of its period setting. With rival families, murdered patriarchs and Albanian-style blood feuds — not to mention a talking moon — modern adaptations often come across as implausibly melodramatic.
Hats off, then, to Barney Norris for his decision to strip back much of the excess drama for his West Country rewrite of Blood Wedding. Norris stays loyal to the play’s central arc — a frenzied bride torn between her husband-to-be and her bad-boy ex-boyfriend — but decides to dispense with much of the baggage (not to mention half of the characters). It’s a bold move, but one that pays dividends. What’s left is still recognisably Blood Wedding, but only in the same way that Clueless is still Jane Austen. And like Clueless, it can stand just as well on its own two feet.
This regional production is an example of how theatre, as a cultural service, is meant to work
Norris recasts the main characters as small-town British archetypes.
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