Yerma
by Simon Stone, after Federico Garcia Lorca
Directed by Simon Stone
Designed by Lizzie Clachan
Music and sound Stefan Gregory
The Young Vic, London
Friday 28th July 2017
CAST
Maureen Beattie – Helen, her mother
Brendan Cowell – John, her partner
John Macmillan – Victor, her ex
Billie Piper – Yerma
Charlotte Randle – Mary, her sister
Thalissa Teixeira- Des, her assistant
Billie Piper is Yerma
Technically a preview, but it is a revival of the 2016 production that had 5 star reviews and won awards and that we couldn’t get tickets for however hard we tried, and we did try hard. It has the same cast exactly. Billie Piper took six awards in 2016, including the Olivier Award, for Best Actress for Yerma, hence the revival. The play was also the Olivier Award 2017 for Best Play of 2016. Billie Piper said that Lorca’s 1934 original, while poetic, was to be read rather than watched, and that Simon Stone and the cast grew the current play organically in rehearsal. The original was set in rural Spain in the 1930s, and Yerma was not a subtle name … it means ‘barren.’ Simon Stone has moved it to contemporary London and reduced a cast of thirty plus to six. I’ve read the original in Three Tragedies under duress many years ago. Effectively this is a new and better play based on an existing plot.
The theatre is in two banks with the stage as a glass walled box between the two linear audience sections. The many scenes, divided into six chapters, are marked by blackouts and titles on TV monitors (a bit of a neck stretch to look up to at the front, so potentially missable). The blackouts have loud recorded female voices earlier on, industrial music later. Somehow quite extraordinary changes take place in the short blackouts with actors repositioned, actors recostumed, props on and off, and most remarkably the floor goes from white carpet to green grass to icy white grass to festival mud. I haven’t worked out how. It’s not just lighting, because the mud is real as is the rain at the rock festival. We also get a “Godot” tree in their garden going from green to dying. Right near the front in Row B, we saw no movement in the blackouts. I wondered how well it worked from “the other side” as our side got some spectacular “against the glass” stuff.
Yerma is a journalist in contemporary London, first seen lying on the foor entwined with partner, John (Brendan Cowell) muttering rapidly across each other in a way only amplification permits. He is a world traveling businessman. Their explicit drunken conversation reveals that his favoured sexual practices are non-reproductive. They decide to try for a child … she is 31 and feels her biological clock is ticking. He stamps her contraceptive pills into the carpet.
Mary (Charlotte Randall)
But nothing happens, while her sister Mary (Charlotte Randall) gets instantly pregnant and her university lecturer mum (Maureen Beattie) says much the same happened with her. Mum has some great funny lines about the Sixties. 1960s. Maureen Beattie captured a type perfectly, down to the reluctance to hug her daughter … the Scottish ascent helps.
Time passes. Yerma is now doing a blog, and has a sexy 21 year old assistant, Des (Thalissa Teixiera) who is cheerfully promiscuous and eats morning after pills like Smarties (in spite of Boots exorbitant prices … a July 2017 reference they failed to add in, though I’d guess the Trump line was a 2017 addition … maybe not.)
Des (Thalissa Teixiera)
As the years roll by and pregnancy doesn’t come, Yerma gets more embittered. Her ex-boyfriend Victor turns up to work under her at the paper (John Macmillan) … a brilliant first meeting scene by both actors. Much later in the play we find out she had an abortion when she was 23.
We both jumped a bit at the real distressed baby on stage (who turns out to be Mary’s son). He was startled and distressed at first, having been carried on in darkness then suddenly being in blinding light, though Billie Piper calmed him briefly by showing him the audience through the glass walls … she had the magic touch. Even so, I’m not comfortable with real distressed babies at all in the theatre. I can’t think there is ever any excuse for doing it. It’s not like the chickens in Jerusalem or the animals in The Ferryman. It’s a human child. Shame on the director and on the parents too. You could have had an assumed newborn in a cot, silently. Sorry. I nearly took a star off for it. Later ‘the baby’ was an unseen presence in a carry chair. As it should be.
As another couple of years pass her blog gets more savage. They try IVF, it uses up all their money. Both lose their jobs. It moves to chaos at a rock festival among the mud and vomit. The ending is shocking, extreme, incredible acting and inevitable.
Yerma in the mud
Lorca can be commended in that his 1930s rural tragedy hits a universal on fertility, ticking clocks, tragic desperation for a child. Also couples torn apart without the cement of offspring. Simon Stone can be commended for bringing it up to date so brilliantly.
Yes, Billie Piper’s Yerma is an extraordinary performance. It’s an incredibly powerful play. We didn’t see it last year, but can see her performance was the best of all. As it will be this year.
It’s not quite a level playing field though … behind the glass walls, the cast are all mic’d up, so that they can go from intimate film acting whisper, mutter and intakes of breath right up to full on stage shouting and screaming. You could not hit that range without the technology in anything beyond a tiny studio theatre, and on all four women the wires are hidden in the hair. Brendan Cowell’s mic is clearly seen, and you can see the wire on the back of John Macmillan’s neck. In fact everything must be hidden in Billie Piper’s hair … on a close clinch early on we heard microphones clashing. It’s not only being mic’d … you see that at the RSC and Globe in large spaces nowadays, but they’re mic’d within the glass box, so effectively in a studio with fine control of levels. It allows a phenomenal range from all six cast members.
Third day in of its second season. As Billie Piper took a universal standing ovation, I was pleased to see the other five cast members at the side clapping her just as enthusiastically.
Overall:
*****
TO SEE IT IN CINEMAS:
LIVE BROADCAST 31 August 2017 in UK
International: 21s September 2017
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
BRENDAN COWELL
Life of Galileo, Young Vic, 2017
THALISSA TEIXEIRA
Othello, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2017 (Emilia)
The Broken Heart, Wanamaker Playhouse 2015
The Changeling, Wanamaker Playhouse 2015
JOHN MACMILLAN
The Homecoming, Trafalgar Studios 2015