Lorca: Three Plays E-Book

Federico García Lorca

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding. Three of Federico García Lorca's most famous plays in a single volume, translated from the Spanish and introduced by one of Scotland's finest playwrights, Jo Clifford. Lorca's passionate, lyrical tales of longing and revenge put the spotlight on the rural poor of 1930's Spain and are considered to be masterpieces of twentieth-century theatre. These plays exhibit Lorca's intense anger at the injustices of society, and his determination to create art that might remedy it. The collection contains Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, in sensitive, accurate and playable translations, and a full introduction to Lorca, his times and his work.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Introduction to Federico García Lorca

Introduction to Blood Wedding

Introduction to Yerma

Introduction to The House of Bernarda Alba

Key Dates

Further Reading

Blood Wedding

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Yerma

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

The House of Bernarda Alba

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)

Lorca was born on 5 June 1898. The year was a hugely significant one in Spanish cultural and political history: it gave its name to a whole generation of writers who used the events of this year as a rallying cry in efforts to convince the Spanish people of their country’s deplorable state and the desperate need for re-evaluation and change. They were called the ‘Generation of ’98’, and they included Azorín, Baroja and Ángel Ganivet.

The historical event that inspired this movement was the disastrous war with the United States which led to the loss of Cuba, Spain’s last remaining colony. This apparently distant event was to have huge repercussions for Lorca. Cuba had been Spain’s principal source of sugar; Lorca’s father was to be astute enough to plant his land with sugar beet, and with the aid of a series of successful land purchases, he was to become one of the richest men in the Fuente Vaqueros district.

A long-term consequence of this was that Lorca himself never needed to earn his own living. There’s no question this wealthy background contributed both to the large volume, and the technical and emotional daring, of his work. As it happened, Blood Wedding in particular was hugely successful; but the financial security of his position left him absolutely free to write as he wanted without regard to the demands of the commercial theatre of his day.

However, the most immediate consequence for the young Lorca was that he spent his childhood as the rich son of the wealthiest landowner of a mainly poor village.

Perhaps the best way for us to imagine the impact on Lorca’s sensibility is to think of our own feelings towards the desperately poor of the Third World – or the homeless that many of us pass each day on the street. The contrast between his wealth and the poverty of so many of those around him left a deep impression on Lorca, which he was to express in later life in his autobiographical essay ‘My Village’.

The plight of one family affected Lorca particularly deeply. One of his friends in the village was a little girl whose father was a chronically ill day labourer and whose mother was the exhausted victim of countless pregnancies. The one day on which Federico was not allowed to visit their home was washing day: the members of this family had only one set of clothes, and they had to stay inside their house while their only clothes were being washed and dried. Lorca wrote:

When I returned home on those occasions, I would look into the wardrobe, full of clean, fragrant clothes, and feel dreadfully anxious, with a dead weight on my heart.

He grew up with a profound sense of indignation at this kind of injustice:

No one dares to ask for what he needs. No one dares . . . to demand bread. And I who say this grew up among these thwarted lives. I protest against this mistreatment of those who work the land.

The young man who wrote this protest at the end of his adolescence maintained a profound anger right to the end of his life. In an interview he gave in 1936, he stated: ‘As long as there is economic injustice in the world, the world will be unable to think clearly.’

He continued the interview with a fable to illustrate the difficulties of creating valid art in a situation of economic injustice:

Two men are walking along a riverbank. One of them is rich, the other poor. One has a full belly and the other fouls the air with his yawns. And the rich man says: ‘What a lovely little boat out on the water! Look at that lily blooming on the bank!’ And the poor man wails: ‘I’m hungry, so hungry!’ Of course. The day when hunger is eradicated there is going to be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever seen. I’m talking like a real socialist, aren’t I?

For Lorca, the art of creating theatre was totally bound up with the process of creating a better society:

The idea of art for art’s sake is something that would be cruel if it weren’t, fortunately, so ridiculous. No decent person believes any longer in all that nonsense about pure art, art for art’s sake. At this dramatic moment in time, the artist should laugh and cry with his people. We must put down the bouquet of lilies and bury ourselves up to the waist in mud to help those who are looking for lilies. For myself, I have a genuine need to communicate with others. That’s why I knocked at the door of the theatre and why I now devote all my talents to it.

This passionate anger at the injustice of human society, and equally passionate determination to create art that might remedy it, were fuelled not simply by his childhood experiences. As an adult, he had travelled to New York, and witnessed at first hand the devastating impact of the Wall Street crash:

It’s the spectacle of all the world’s money in all its splendour, its mad abandon and its cruelty… This is where I have got a clear idea of what a huge mass of people fighting to make money is really like. The truth is that it’s an international war with just a thin veneer of courtesy… We ate breakfast on a thirty-second floor with the head of a bank, a charming person with a cold and feline side quite English. People came in there after being paid. They were all counting dollars. Their hands all had the characteristic tremble that holding money gives them… Colin [an acquaintance] had five dollars in his purse and I three. Despite this he said to me: ‘We’re surrounded by millions and yet the only two decent people here are you and I.’

And when he writes so angrily of the ‘thwarted lives’ of those whose existence is dominated by money, it is clear Lorca is thinking not simply of the plight of the rural poor, but also of the bourgeoisie to which he himself, and many of us, now belong.

He is concerned not simply with the suffering that a wealthy middle class inflicts on those beneath them on the social scale; he is equally concerned with the suffering they inflict upon themselves. The ‘thwarted lives’ he saw in his village are not simply those of the poor.

Lorca perceived this very clearly: for the comparative wealth possessed by the characters in these plays brings them no happiness. They seem trapped by the conventions and the demands of the society they inhabit.

Lorca and Theatre

Lorca once said that you could judge the health of a nation’s culture by looking at the state of its theatre. And for him theatre was a natural extension of poetry: a poetry that leaps off the printed page, escapes from between the pages of books ‘and becomes human. It shouts and speaks. It cries and despairs.’

For Lorca there was nothing precious about poetry; it was simply part of living. He once wrote: ‘Poetry is something that just walks along the street.’

Because for him it was a part of living, to be deprived of it was a kind of torment; and to deprive people of the chance of experiencing it was a kind of crime. In an interview he gave to an English journalist he spoke of his anger at the lack of theatre that was the norm in Spain outside the capital: ‘Theatre is almost dead outside Madrid, and the people suffer accordingly, as they would if they had lost eyes or ears or sense of taste.’

He also said, ‘I will always be on the side of those who have nothing.’ He was a political writer in the deepest sense, in that the act of writing was part of the struggle for a better world.

Sometimes, when I think of what is going on in the world, I wonder why am I writing? The answer is that one simply has to work. Work and go on working. Work and help everyone who deserves it. Work even though at times it feels like so much wasted effort. Work as a form of protest. For one’s impulse has to be to cry out every day one wakes up and is confronted by misery and injustice of every kind: I protest! I protest! I protest!

All these concerns came together in Lorca’s work for La Barraca, the travelling theatre he helped to found in the early years of the Republic. They would set up a simple stage in the town square and perform the great, and then almost completely neglected, classics of the Spanish theatre – the works of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderón.

His work on this incredibly bold and imaginative precursor of our own small-scale touring companies had a profound effect on Lorca. Experiencing the impact these classics made on a mass audience was a source of strength and inspiration; and working on the texts themselves must surely have deepened his remarkable theatre writing skills.

Nature and Folk Culture

Lorca paints a bleak picture of rural life in these plays. But there are moments when we catch glimpses of a very different view of the countryside. The songs that celebrate the wedding of Blood Wedding or the folk wisdom personified by the maid in Act Two Scene Two of the same play: these offer us glimpses of a natural world full of joyfulness, beauty and fertility.

This is actually far more like the world Lorca mostly saw as a child. The love of it always remained with him, and, as he said himself, the natural world remained a source of inspiration throughout his life:

I love the countryside. I feel myself linked to it in all my emotions. My oldest childhood memories have the flavour of the earth. The meadows, the fields, have done wonders for me. The wild animals of the countryside, the livestock, the people living on the land, all these have a fascination very few people grasp. I recall them now exactly as I knew them in my childhood.

A still more important source of inspiration was the speech of the villagers:

My whole childhood was centred on the village. Shepherds, fields, sky, solitude. Total simplicity. I’m often surprised when people think that the things in my work are daring improvisations of my own, a poet’s audacities. Not at all. They’re authentic details, and seem strange to a lot of people because it’s not often that we approach life in such a simple, straightforward fashion: looking and listening. Such an easy thing, isn’t it? . . . I have a huge storehouse of childhood recollections in which I can hear the people speaking. This is poetic memory, and I trust it implicitly.

‘This is poetic memory’: here we have another key to Lorca’s creativity. As he said himself, he had in his memory a huge ‘storehouse’ of snatches of folklore, popular expressions and popular song: a storehouse he could draw on whenever necessary to produce a dazzling array of extraordinary imagery.

This is something denied to most of us, growing up in this age, this place, and this time. The industrial revolution has almost completely erased our folk heritage, and severed our connections with it. In Scotland, this process was deliberately begun by the destruction of the clan culture following the collapse of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745. In England, where I grew up, the process was less brutal but perhaps more thorough; and folk culture, if it still lives at all, is mostly preserved in museums or in those festivals in which middle-aged people rather self-consciously dress up as Morris dancers, clog dancers, or dancers round the maypole.

Because we have never known it, it is hard for us to appreciate what this folk culture meant, or even measure exactly what it is we have lost. Lorca’s biographer, Ian Gibson expresses it beautifully:

Lorca inherited all the vigour of a speech that springs from the earth and expresses itself with extraordinary spontaneity. Indeed, one has only to hear the inhabitants of the Vega talk and observe their colourful use of imagery to realise that the metaphorical language of Lorca’s theatre and poetry, which seems… so original, is rooted in an ancient, collective awareness of nature in which all things – trees, horses, mountains, the moon and the sun, rivers, flowers, human beings – are closely related and interdependent.

Those of us who live in Scotland are fortunate in that to a certain extent spoken Scots still retains some of its vivid capacity for metaphor, its sense of shared culture, its vibrant energy and sense of utter delight in the richness of the spoken word – characteristics that have been beautifully exploited in plays like Tony Roper’s The Steamie or Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off.

To get a proper sense of Lorca’s work, it is most important to reflect on this linguistic richness (which rarely, if ever, comes across in translation), and particularly to reflect on the way in which we all employ and enjoy the use of metaphors – ‘black affronted’, ‘you tube’, or ‘a load of mince’. It is sad but necessary to add, though, that this is all pretty poor stuff compared to the immense linguistic richness Lorca had at his disposal, and which shines through all his poetry and his plays.

In a celebrated lecture Lorca gave on imagery in the work of the seventeenth-century poet Gongora, he spoke of the connections between this poet’s supposedly highly artificial and obscure use of imagery and the completely spontaneous and unaffected use of imagery of the people of Andalucia. For instance, where he came from, Lorca explained, when people want to describe water flowing strongly and slowly along a deep irrigation channel they talk of the ‘ox of the water’ – a surprising and beautiful image that encapsulates the water’s slowness, strength, and even the visual impression of the water patterns made as you wade through it. Similarly, when one of his cousins was teaching him how to boil eggs, she told him to put the eggs in the water ‘when it starts to laugh’.

Gender Issues

Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba are generally thought of as a trilogy of Lorca’s plays portraying the repression of women in Spanish rural life. In each play, Lorca portrays a world whose sexual mores trap women in an odiously repressive set of double standards that expect men to give full rein to their sexuality but savagely punish any woman who expresses hers. The central characters of these three plays, on the contrary, are all women whose sexuality is denied them, women trapped in a repressive society which denies them the possibility of life itself.

If we are to understand this fully, we must again try to put it into the context of Lorca’s own life and experience. By all accounts he was in some respects a very solitary child. Long periods of ill health kept him in isolation from other children; and besides he suffered from a slight deformity. He had extremely flat feet, and one leg was slightly shorter than the other which meant he walked with a very characteristic sway.

Like many a lonely child, he took refuge in the richness of his imagination; something all the more important to him as he grew older and attended secondary school where he was bullied and ridiculed by some of his more brutal classmates. They said he was effeminate and gave him the nickname of ‘Federica’.

As he grew older, his inner isolation was deepened by the realisation of his homosexuality; and this led to a profound inner anguish which it is important we make the imaginative effort to understand.

The machismo of Spanish culture has been traditionally associated with a deep loathing of homosexuality which has only recently begun to dissipate. Even as recently as 1971, I remember a male friend in Granada telling me that, ‘To be homosexual is the greatest misfortune that can befall a man.’

In the far more traditional Spain of the twenties and thirties Lorca’s sexuality was a source of profound shame, a secret he of necessity had to conceal from his parents and from everyone except his most intimate friends.

It is important to take a moment to reflect on what this means: not as an abstraction, but as an experience lived through in the imagination. It means that when he felt attracted to someone, he was not able to reach out and touch them; not able to express tenderness or affection; not able to put his arm round someone in the street, not able to kiss them. It means feeling obliged to deny the deepest impulses of body and heart: obliged both to deny and to repress them. It means every sexual encounter has to happen in secret and runs the risk of exposure and betrayal. In short, it means being denied the most fundamental of human freedoms. And these are the very same freedoms denied the women in these plays.

So in these plays Lorca is making a statement about the situation of women suffering repression; and it is also important we find the connections between their situation and that of the homosexual suffering repression in a homophobic society. And perhaps we also need to reflect on the way boys in general are brought up in our own culture and our own time: in the denial of spontaneity and the denial of tenderness. For in the end, the forces that repress women repress the whole of humanity.

BLOOD WEDDING

What Happens in the Play

Act One Scene One    The bridegroom asks his mother for a knife. He is going to his vineyard, and he wants to cut grapes. This frightens her, and brings up her grief at the loss of her husband and other son. They were killed by knives in a feud with another family of the village, the Felix. The young man wants his mother to leave her grief be; he wants her to consent to his proposed marriage. She agrees to buy the betrothal gifts, and make the visit to the bride-to-be’s family as custom demands. After her son’s departure, a neighbour enters. The mother discovers from her that the girl used to have a relationship with a young man, which got broken off, and that the young man, Leonardo, belonged to the clan of the Felix. The scene ends on a note of foreboding.

Act One Scene Two    A young mother sings a lullaby to her baby. We learn the baby’s father is Leonardo; that his marriage is an unhappy one; and that there are rumours that he is riding over to see his former lover. The scene ends with the lullaby, which has now also been tainted with foreboding.

Act One Scene Three    The mother and her son have come to visit the bride-to-be and her father. The father welcomes the proposed marriage, because he sees it as furthering his commercial interests. The bride-to-be is, however, in two minds about her proposed marriage. And at the very end of the act, it becomes clear that Leonardo is riding over to see her.

Act Two Scene One    The bride-to-be is getting dressed for her wedding. We learn she is herself the daughter of an unhappy marriage. Leonardo has ridden ahead of the other guests to arrive first; the bride-to-be breaks all the conventions by seeing him. We learn that they still desire each other; that their proposed marriage was broken off because he was considered too poor; and that the bride-to-be is getting married now to try to still the passion that continues to consume her. The songs of the guests to celebrate the coming wedding strike a deeply ironic note.

Act Two Scene Two    It is some hours later, and the maid is happily preparing the wedding meal for when everyone returns from the church. The father remains complacent about the wedding, and the prospect of grandchildren to work his land; the mother wrestles with her forebodings; the bride-to-be remains mired in her inner conflict.

The bridegroom does his poor best to be correct. It gradually becomes clear that Leonardo and the bride-to-be have eloped together. The bridegroom and his mother gather the guests together to set off to pursue them and get revenge.

Act Three Scene One    We are in a wood at night. Three woodcutters, who gradually seem to us to represent elemental forces of nature, tell of the couple’s flight and the noose tightening around them. The moon enters, personified by another woodcutter: a sinister figure, hungry for the couple’s blood. Death enters, personified by an old beggarwoman. The moon will shed his eerie light on the fleeing couple to ensure they are seen and caught by their pursuers. The bridegroom stumbles over Death. She promises to guide him to his prey. The pursued couple enter, still in the grip of a passion they know to be self-destructive, but which they also know they cannot deny. Soon after they leave, we hear two piercing screams; Death opens her cloak like a black bird with outspread wings. The curtain descends in deep silence.

Final Scene    Young girls are spinning thread. Leonardo’s wife and mother enter in deep mourning. Then the bridegroom’s mother, and her neighbour from the first act. We understand that the bridegroom and Leonardo have killed each other. The bride enters to expose herself to the mother’s rage. She hopes she will kill her, but the older woman discovers she cannot. The play ends on a note of suffering without respite or hope.

Sources

A few months after Blood Wedding opened in 1933, Lorca gave an interview in which he declared that the original idea for it came from a press report he had read about a murder that took place in Almería.

Recently discovered press reports confirm that this was in fact the case. A young bride eloped with her cousin just after her wedding; the couple had been pursued by outraged relatives and the young man had been killed.

In perhaps less direct ways, too, we can see that Lorca drew inspiration in this play, as in all his others, from the events and social structures that shaped his own life.

Blood Wedding on Stage

The play opened in the Teatro Beatriz in Madrid on 8 March 1933. Since the moment of its opening, it has had continuous commercial success. The first production ran for two months in Madrid, another two months in Barcelona; the play was then produced in Buenos Aires, where it ran for more than a hundred performances. The triumphant success of this production, supervised by Lorca himself, was the precursor to equally successful transfers back to Madrid and Barcelona in 1935.

It was published in 1936, translated into French and English that same year; and since then has been repeatedly staged throughout Europe and the Americas, where it is universally recognised as one of the major plays of the twentieth century.

A major literary source for the play were the plays of Synge, which Lorca read in translation while at the Residencia de Estudiantes; perhaps that is one reason why the play has been translated and performed so often in Ireland, where the action of the play is often relocated to the Irish countryside.

In a way, the play’s continuing popularity and success is surprising, given the difficulties involved in staging it well. In the West, it is extraordinarily hard to create a convincing stage picture of a society so profoundly connected with the earth to an audience so profoundly alienated from it.

Also, given the profound transformation in the situation of women in the West, it may be tempting to dismiss the play on the grounds that ‘such things don’t happen any more’.

Perhaps it is worth remembering that the majority of women in the contemporary world still live under conditions of patriarchy as oppressive as those Lorca describes; or that a recent survey by the United Nations estimates that there are more casualties resulting from acts of violence against women than from all current conventional wars.

Lorca’s profound compassion for suffering humanity and his passionate protest on behalf of those suffering oppression of all kinds need to be heard more than ever.

YERMA

What Happens in the Play

Act One Scene One Yerma is dreaming. Someone is singing a lullaby: a shepherd leads a child to her by the hand.