DalTheatre hasn’t sealed up their Halloween buckets of blood quite yet (that’s a thing, right?). Their new production, Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, translated and adapted by Ted Hughes, promises tragedy, love and love and tragedy. Says director Jure Gantar of what is arguably Lorca’s most popular play, “It’s beautifully poetic and offers us a wonderful combination of the realism of Andalusian countryside and the surrealism of the ‘20s and ‘30s. As in all of Lorca’s plays, women play a very prominent role.” A strong female cast, lots of blood and crying? So in.
Written in 1932, Gantar says the play is surprisingly relatable. “What makes an eighty-year-old Spanish play so appealing for contemporary audiences is that it stages the consequences of a wrong decision in a relationship, something to which almost everyone can relate,” says Gantar. “And when one loves passionately, a wrong decision can only have a tragic outcome.”
As you know, we never fail to ask the hard-hitting questions here. What is Gantar’s best fake blood recipe? “The perfect fake blood recipe is the one that doesn’t involve any chemistry but depends on the actors alone,” says Gantar. “With a good cast, the characters can swim in pools of blood but will never get a stain on their costumes.” Mysterious!
The play runs November 22-26 at 8pm (with a November 26 matinee at 2pm) at the Sir James Dunn Theatre.
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 2011.
