Lorca Plays: 1

Blood Wedding; Yerma; Dona Rosita the Spinster

Federico Garcia Lorca, Gwynne Edwards, Peter Luke

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780413157805
• eBook ISBN: 9781408141236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

These three tragedies were written at the height if Lorca's powers and display his innovative mix of Spanish popular tradition and modern dramatic technique. Blood Wedding tells the story of a couple drawn irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage; Doña Rosita the Spinster follows the appalling fate of a young woman beguiled into the expectation of marriage and left stranded for a lifetime whilst Yerma is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility. Set in and around his home territory, Granada, the plays return again and again to the lives of passionate individuals, particularly women, trapped by the social conventions of narrow peasant communities. The plays appear here in new playable translations.

Blood Wedding

Translated by Gwynne Edwards

This translation of Blood Wedding was first performed at the Contact theatre, Manchester on 11 November 1987, with the following cast:

THE MOTHER	Maureen Morris
THE BRIDE	Sara Mair Thomas
THE MOTHER-IN-LAW/GIRL 2	Anni Domingo
THE NEIGHBOUR/THE SERVANT	Fenella Norman
THE WIFE OF LEONARDO	Charlotte Harvey
GIRL 1/DEATH(as a beggar woman)	Joan Carol Williams
LEONARDO	Tyrone Huggins
THE BRIDEGROOM	Ewen Cummins
THE FATHER OF THE BRIDE/THE MOON	Wyllie Longmore
YOUTH	Mark Crowshaw

WOODCUTTERS/GIRLS/GUESTS played by members of the Company

Directed by Anthony Clark

Designed by Nettie Edwards

Musical Director/Composer Mark Vibrans

Lighting by Stephen Henbest

Choreography by David Needham

Act One

Scene One

Room painted yellow.

BRIDEGROOM (entering). Mother.

MOTHER. What?

BRIDEGROOM. I’m going.

MOTHER. Where to?

BRIDEGROOM. To the vineyard. (He starts to go out.)

MOTHER. Wait.

BRIDEGROOM. Do you want something?

MOTHER. Son, your breakfast.

BRIDEGROOM. Leave it. I’ll eat grapes. Give me the knife.

MOTHER. What for?

BRIDEGROOM (laughing). To cut them.

MOTHER (muttering and looking for it). The knife, the knife … Damn all of them and the scoundrel who invented them.

BRIDEGROOM. Let’s change the subject.

MOTHER. And shotguns . . and pistols … even the tiniest knife … and mattocks and pitchforks …

BRIDEGROOM. Alright.

MOTHER. Everything that can cut a man’s body. A beautiful man, tasting the fullness of life, who goes out to the vineyards or tends to his olives, because they are his, inherited …

BRIDEGROOM (lowering his head). Be quiet.

MOTHER. … and that man doesn’t come back. Or if he does come back it’s to put a palm-leaf on him or a plateful of coarse salt to stop him swelling. I don’t know how you dare carry a knife on your body, nor how I can leave the serpent inside the chest.

BRIDEGROOM. Is that it?

MOTHER. If I lived to be a hundred, I wouldn’t speak of anything else. First your father. He had the scent of carnation for me, and I enjoyed him for three short years. Then your brother. Is it fair? Is it possible that a thing as small as a pistol or a knife can put an end to a man who’s a bull? I’ll never be quiet. The months pass and hopelessness pecks at my eyes … even at the roots of my hair.

BRIDEGROOM (forcefully). Are you going to stop?

MOTHER. No. I won’t stop. Can someone bring your father back to me? And your brother? And then there’s the gaol. What is the gaol? They eat there, they smoke there, they play instruments there. My dead ones full of weeds, silent, turned to dust; two men who were two geraniums … The murderers, in gaol, as large as life, looking at the mountains …

BRIDEGROOM. Do you want me to kill them?

MOTHER. No… If I speak it’s because … How am I not going to speak seeing you go out of that door? I don’t like you carrying a knife. It’s just that … I wish you wouldn’t go out to the fields.

BRIDEGROOM (laughing). Come on!

MOTHER. I’d like you to be a woman. You wouldn’t be going to the stream now and the two of us would embroider edgings and little woollen dogs.

BRIDEGROOM (he puts his arm around his mother and laughs). Mother, what if I were to take you with me to the vineyards?

MOTHER. What would an old woman do in the vineyards? Would you put me under the vine-shoots?

BRIDEGROOM (lifting her in his arms). You old woman, you old, old woman, you old, old, old woman.

MOTHER. Your father, now he used to take me there. That’s good stock. Good blood. Your grandfather left a son on every street corner. That’s what I like. Men to be men; wheat wheat.

BRIDEGROOM. What about me, mother?

MOTHER. You? What?

BRIDEGROOM. Do I need to tell you again?

MOTHER (serious). Ah!

BRIDEGROOM. Do you think it’s a bad idea?

MOTHER. No.

BRIDEGROOM. Well then?

MOTHER. I’m not sure. It’s so sudden like this. It’s taken me by surprise. I know that the girl’s good. She is, isn’t she? Well-behaved. Hard-working. She makes her bread and she sews her skirts. But even so, when I mention her name, it’s as if they were pounding my head with a stone.

BRIDEGROOM. Don’t be s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Federico García Lorca: A Chronology
• Introduction
• Blood Wedding
• Note on the Translation of blood wedding
• Doña rosita the spinster
• Note on the Translation of doña rosita
• Yerma
• Note on the Translation of yerma
• Footnote
• by the same author
• Imprint