Barney Norris tames Lorca’s Spanish tragedy in this gentle adaptation set in modern-day Wiltshire. At the back of a crumbling house in Edington, Georgie (Lily Nichol) and Rob (Reece Evans) prepare to sign their vows, till death do them part. Alice Hamilton’s direction breathes natural, easy life into the wedding party, with the characters extricated from their archetypes, but the production lacks a necessary ferocity.
All of them are reaching for something more: Georgie is marrying Rob in the hope that it will paper over the cracks in her life, while Lee (Emmet Byrne) wants Georgie to fall back in love with him. Norris mines for the small belly-flip moments of the everyday, and writes exceptionally about the way life lets us down. In one delicate scene, Lee sits on the roof to watch the sun rise, hoping to see the land catch fire, but instead he sees only the orange glow of cars and houses as the Moonrakers’ county wakes up. These tender moments of hope lined with disappointment are where the play feels most alive.
Norris, Hamilton and Evans are all former members of the Salisbury Playhouse youth theatre, and the play feels grounded in the bold landscape. But something is missing: the rage, the tug, the power of love that Lorca suggests. While this story doesn’t need the bloody violence to work, it needs a more powerful force than this production offers. The climax is delivered by narration rather than action, in a tell-not-show ending that reaches for the mythic in a way that jars and feels slightly preachy.
Most memorable is Byrne’s razor-sharp performance as Lee. A young father, a builder, a traveller and a rejected lover, he walks with the weight of his worries heavy on his sloping shoulders. He’s tougher and older than Rob but, picking at his fingernails as he asks Georgie to give up everything she’s just promised to another man, he looks so young, so frightened, so hungry. There’s a fuel to him that the rest of the cast can’t quite match.
•At Salisbury Playhouse until 22 February.
