Translating Lorca is one of the sternest challenges a theatrical practitioner can face. Not only do you need to find an equivalent for the intense, symbolically weighted language, there has to be a context in which the rural folklore and rigid honour codes of southern Andalucía make sense.
Yerma ("barren" in Spanish) is a case in point: the poetic tragedy of a childless woman who, having failed to become pregnant by her husband, attempts to do so by superstition. While we lack any specific fertility rites in which girls line up outside a saint's grotto while the men prance round dressed as bulls, there is no shortage of women suffering the quiet agony of failing to conceive; and Ursula Rani Sarma's new version, sublimely directed by Roísín McBrinn, cuts to the heart of this all-too-common despair.
It's not abundantly clear where the action is supposed to be set: the accents are predominantly Irish, which explains the repressive Catholicism, if not the bulls. Yet Sarma's version, played out on a naked stage beneath a pensive moon, achieves a rare quality of universality. The language is rich and metaphorical, yet never sounds unnatural, while the dialogue flows seamlessly into lyrics sung to Richard Taylor's disquieting music.
It all hinges on a convincingly desperate central performance from Kate Stanley-Brennan, who casually lets slip that she and her cruelly indifferent husband (Jonah Russell) have been trying for two years and 20 days, and could probably narrow it down to the hour if pressed. Few Lorca productions entirely escape absurdity: McBrinn's staging is stronger in the bucolic early scenes than the mystic later ones. But Lorca believed theatre should be "poetry that becomes human enough to talk"; and Sarma's version speaks more clearly than most.
