This is how theatre should work post-Brexit: Blood Wedding reviewed

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.

Norris recasts the main characters as small-town British archetypes. Lee, based on Lorca’s hot-tempered Leonardo, is an undereducated local hardman. Rob is a slightly clueless video-game geek who vents his social frustrations on his long-suffering mum. And Georgie, who dumps Lee on the instruction of her anti-traveller father, is one of those working-class beauties destined to be worn down by a world that will never fully appreciate her.

Leaving Lorca aside, it’s clear that Norris himself is a mightily talented dramatist. Every moment of the play — even the rehashed moon scene — is both believable and engaging. One of his clever turns is to leave the wedding itself off-stage, and to set the pivotal scenes in the outdoor smoking area. It works because it’s so recognisable. Who hasn’t found themselves having a heart-to-heart in a pub car park, as the deadened but recognisable tones of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ throb through the walls? Norris, I suspect, has eavesdropped on a good few such conversations in his time.