Originally featured in The Founder Newspaper, October 2020

There’s something to be said about the partisan element of weddings.

Despite marriages being ceremonies designed to bring two families together, in most ceremonies the bride and groom’s parties are seated separately, sat with their own kin at dinners or divided into pews on either side of an aisle. Any witnesses to divorce proceedings can confirm that if the couple splits, their two tribes are quite willing to go to war.

Cue Blood Wedding.

Yaël Farber, directing, brings Marina Carr’s translation to life in a production which functions as a masterclass in immersion. From the scent design to the play’s cold open in the Mother’s kitchen, the audience are plunged headfirst into a conflict that’s been inflaming both families since ‘the time of the ark’. The cast are solid across the board, and it’s delightful to see three large and important roles played by older women alongside some truly innovative physical theatre at work within the minimalist set.

Before praising the play’s younger trio however, I must emphasise that Romeo and Juliet this is not.

Yes, there are a pair of illicit lovers, one of whom is engaged to a man she does not love. Yes, the play involves a generations long feud. There is no affection, however, between Leonardo and the Bride; if it can be described as a love triangle at all it’s one of vicious, possessive and jagged angles.

The play is about tribes. Aoife Duffin’s Bride protests against being manhandled by the Mother, declaring she is not a “cow at a market”. Throughout the course of the play however, she is described in such terms, a ‘heiffer’ with hips for the ‘job at hand’. David Walmsley’s Groom (in turns impressively sympathetic, comical and entirely dislikable) is similarly described as a bull, instructed to get as many sons out of his new wife as possible to expand their family’s depleted numbers. The rival Leonardo should then be an understandable escape route, a way of fleeing a life she’s being forced into to cement loyalties between families; a lover she chose. That isn’t the case however: Leonardo is possessive and impulsive, already married to her cousin in an act of spite

The play is set in-the-round, with characters in perpetual motion displaying great feats of strength. Because of this, and the circling of Leonardo and the Groom at several points during the play, the audience feels like spectators at a gladiatorial pit. This choice and his refusal to run later lend weight to the Bride’s cry that Leonardo never wanted her, just the blood of the Mother’s ‘fine son’.

Which is entirely the point. Between monologues exploring tension between races and the broad Irish accents used in the play, it is impossible to leave Blood Wedding without reflecting on the futility of conflicts based on arbitrary characteristics. Lorca’s play was written in 1930s Spain, pre-empting the rise of a facist leader; Ireland is still scarred by the Troubles. Given the increasingly divided state of the UK in 2019, Blood Wedding is a timely arrival to the Young Vic’s church.