Blood Wedding
Federico García Lorca
Workbook
Federico García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, near Granada, the eldest son of four children. An illness when he was two months old prevented him attending school until he was four. He was educated at home by his mother, Doña Vicente Lorca Romero. His father, Don Federico García Rodriguez, was a prosperous farmer.
In 1909 his family moved to Granada and he attended the College of the Sacred Heart. Five years later he began his studies at the University of Granada, in the Faculties of Arts and Law, but without enthusiasm.
In 1915 he began to study piano and guitar - giving some private recitals at the Conservatory - and started to attend literary gatherings at the Cafe Alameda in Granada. He also formed a friendship with Fernando de los Ríos, Professor of Political Law.
Two years later he travelled to different cities and regions of Andalusia and Castile on educational visits organised by Martin Dominguez Berrueta, Professor of Art Theory. A meeting with Manuel de Falla further stimulated his love of music.
Lorca published his first book - Impressions & Landscapes - in 1918; it was based on his trips the year before.
The following year he left Granada for Madrid to begin a ten-year stay at the Residence for Students. Among his close friends were Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, both champions of the avante-garde.
During this time - whilst striving to conceal his homosexuality - he wrote his first play, The Butterfly's Evil Spell, which was performed at Madrid's Teatro Eslava in 1920. The following year Lorca's first volume of poetry, Book of Poems, was published.
1927 saw the publication of Songs, his second volume of poetry; in the same year his play Mariana Pineda opened to considerable claim in Barcelona.
Lorca's best-known volume of poetry, Gypsy Ballads, was published in 1928 and the following year marked the start of a nine-month visit to the United States where he enrolled as a student of English language at Columbia University. He returned to Spain in 1930 having also visited Cuba. His play The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife opened on 24th December at the Teatro Beatriz in Madrid.
He completed work on his plays The Public and When Five Years Pass in 1931 and, under the auspices of the new Republican government, he became the director of the touring theatre company, La Barraca.
His play Blood Wedding premiered in Madrid in 1933 with Lorca himself directing. It proved a huge success and he went on that year to direct triumphant productions of Mariana Pineda, Blood Wedding and The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife in Argentina.
There was great public and critical acclaim for the Madrid premiere of his next play Yerma in 1934. And the year after, there was an equally enthusiastic reception on the opening night of Doña Rosita the Spinster at the Teatro Principal Palace in Barcelona.
In 1936 - with The House of Bernarda Alba completed and the Spanish Civil War beginning - Lorca left Madrid, arriving in Granada just as it was about to fall to a military insurrection led by Franco. He hid in the house of the poet Luis Rosales but was eventually arrested and detained. In the early hours of the 19th August, he was driven away and shot outside the village of Viznar by members of the Assault Guard and the paramilitary Black Squad. His body was never found.
Federico García Lorca was one of the greatest European dramatists of the twentieth century and his tragic and violent death at the hands of right-wing militia-men in 1936, at the very beginning of the Spanish Civil War, was one of the heaviest blows to European literature.
Lorca's achievement was profound in that his work appealed both to the intelligentsia with whom he mixed, and to the ordinary people of Spain and the Spanish-speaking world.
Lorca's friendship with the Catalan painter Salvador Dalí is well known and well documented. In both Lorca's work and Dalí's we can see the rich vein of Dadaist and surrealist imagery, which delights in unusual and dreamlike comparisons and metaphors.
The Cry
The arc of a cry
goes from hillside
to hillside
from the olives
will be a black rainbow
through the blue night
Ay!
Like the bow of a viola
the shout has set vibrating
long strings of wind.
Ay!
(The folk of the caves
light their lanterns.)
Ay!
from Poema del Cante Jondo.
Both the "black rainbow" and the comparison with the viola bow are typically surreal images from Lorca's poetry.
Lorca's early fame was really achieved by his poetry, firstly through his own memorable readings to small groups of friends in Madrid. Lorca published almost reluctantly, but his early books, Poema del Cante Jondo and Romancero Gitano (Poem of Deep Song ie flamenco, & Gypsy Ballads, respectively) made him famous throughout the Spanish world, and his songs joined the traditional songs of the language, by which they were inspired, and they are still performed today in the flamenco tradition which Lorca himself admired so much.
Lorca himself came to resent being regarded just as a "gypsy poet" but plays like Blood Wedding include much that is also explored in those relatively early gypsy poems. For example, the gypsy Amargo in the poems which feature him seems to be associated with the kind of hereditary violence we meet in Blood Wedding; moreover, on his way to Granada he meets death who is personified, in this case as a chatty horseman, and whose intentions seem as sinister as those of the old Beggarwoman in the later play.
The lament of Amargo's mother, Canción de la Madre del Amargo, prefigures too the final scene:
The Song of the Mother of Amargo
They carry him in my sheet
my laurels and my palm.
On the twenty-seventh of August
with a little knife of gold.
The cross. And we go walking!
He was dark and bitter.
Neighbours, give me a bottle
of brass with lemonade.
The cross. Don't let anyone weep!
Amargo is in the moon.
The imagery too of Blood Wedding is the imagery which Lorca had made his own in the earlier poems. It is this imagery which helps the poetry of the play to become so memorable and dramatic.
Lorca seems to have been interested in the theatre as a child - there are early stories of his purchase when very young of a puppet theatre for which he composed his own plays - and his interest remained always with him.
The theatre in Spain at the time when Lorca was writing was almost moribund. As Reed Anderson says in his very useful short book Federico García Lorca, "[in the 1920s] Spanish theatre … as a commercial enterprise was flourishing, and yet there was constant public discussion of crisis, decadence and stagnation."
It was Lorca's desire to write poetic drama which led him to attempt to revolutionize the theatre of his day. "The theatre that has always endured is theatre written by poets," said Lorca in 1935. Through his State-sponsored theatre group La Barraca Lorca was able to put into practice the dramatic theories he had developed over the years.
Lorca made the following comments after a visit to the village of Toboso in La Mancha where La Barraca presented a play by Calderón de la Barca:
‘The characters in the play were given metal wigs, silver wigs and others of different materials; green beards; gentlemen dressed in costumes with huge shoulder pads. Totally unrealistic by common-sense standards. And in spite of it all - and what a reassurance it was - everything was understood right down to the smallest details by that audience that was being introduced that way for the first time to Calderón. Not one of them found anything that conflicted with his/ her own sense of reality. And it was because we, with our green beards, with our copper hair, with our oversized shoulder pads, we were telling the truth. And the people of the countryside have their hearing and their souls perfectly fashioned to receive, store and ripen the truth that we gave them.’
Although Lorca's own plays were clearly visualized for the 'traditional' proscenium arch theatre (and the productions with which he was associated, notably those promoted by Margarita Xirgu, reflected this in their staging), the scenery and sets made little or no attempt at realism - in the early productions they were designed by Dalí and his followers, and later sets continued this largely unrealistic and decorative form of design.
We can see a similarity then between Lorca as director who defended outlandish costumes on the grounds that they enhanced the truthfulness of the play, and Lorca the playwright who introduced poetic and symbolic scenes into otherwise quite realistic stories to convey truth in his own drama. The use of poetry and symbolism in Blood Wedding, for example, intensifies and strengthens the overall realism of the play: Lorca is always interested in making his characters universal as well as individual. There is evidence for this intention in the lack of proper names for most of the cats in Blood Wedding, for example.
Reed Anderson describes the first performance of Blood Wedding:
‘The premiere of Blood Wedding on 7 March 1933 caused a sensation among those who saw the performance. The first act riveted the audience's attention, but the scene in act two with the nuptial celebration, the festive songs and dances and the growing dramatic tension, provoked an ovation that interrupted the drama and brought a surprised Lorca out for a bow. In fact he was also called out to acknowledge the applause that followed each of the play's three acts.
‘The critics immediately recognised Blood Wedding as a work of innovation for its adventuresome use of an unusually broad range of the theatre resources. Also impressive was its consistent high seriousness, and its almost classical delineation of the tragic conflict. What people were least prepared for was the mixture of realism and poetic symbolism. Lorca had established the tragic potential of the action during the first two acts in an identifiable social context where social dissonances and contradictions were driving the action towards a tragic crisis. …
‘The …problem of mixing prose and poetry throughout the play had been an over-riding concern of Lorca's in rehearsals, and he tirelessly worked with the cast to maintain a single principle: to make the transitions from prose to poetry as natural; as possible by avoiding the declamatory style of acting that was the dominant technique on the stage at the time.
When asked what he would call the most gratifying part of the drama, Lorca said, "The one where the Moon and Death intervene as elements and symbols of fate. The realism that predominates the tragedy up to that point is broken and disappears to give way to poetic fantasy where I naturally feel as comfortable as a fish in water."
Blood Wedding: Act One Scene One
The three scenes of the first act occur in distinct locations, and each one sets in motion the conflicting forces that suggest the play's tragic potential. The first scene between the Mother and the Bridegroom, her son, reveals her complex emotions concerning the proposed marriage, in contrast with her son's lighthearted optimism.
Reed Anderson (in Federico García Lorca, Macmillan).
Landscape
The field
of olive trees
opens and shuts
like a fan.
Above the olive grove
sunk sky
dark rain
of cold stars.
The reeds and darkness tremble
along the river bank.
The grey air ripples.
The olives
are charged
with screams.
A flock
of captive birds
which move their great
tails in shade.
Practical drama work: Matching Emotions with Actions.
Actioning the Text.
Devising actions to accompany text requires an understanding of what is really going on. In Blood Wedding, the Mother's opening lines, for example, are, on the face of it pretty meaningless; what she wants is simply to hold her son in conversation long enough for him to bring up the question of his marriage. Or at least, this could be one interpretation.
Finding ‘actions’ to accompany the text then is an important start to the process of converting script to performance. Some directors call this ‘actioning the text’. Look at the opening two pages. For each speech find an ‘actioning’ word. An ‘actioning’ word should be a transitive verb and should fit the speaker and the occasion, the intention behind the speech.
The Mother greets her son, the Bridegroom, but later, for example, she warns him and protects him. Find a verb for each speech. Particularly long speeches (which we don’t really have here, in fact) may require more than one ‘actioning’ word.
If you were directing this scene, what observations would you make to its author, Lorca, if you were able. What issues does it raise which engage your interest? How and where would you congratulate Lorca for specific achievements? What problems does this opening scene raise?
Hidden emotions.
We also need to learn how actions may change as a result of apparently hidden, or submerged, emotions.
Find a partner and together fold a large piece of material neatly to put it away tidily.
First do this work as naturally as you can. Then repeat the work in the following circumstances:
1. A has to break bad news to B.
2. B has fallen in love with A, who is seeing B's friend C.
3. You, A & B, have just had a terrible row.
4. A close friend of you both has just rung to say he/she is dying of a terminal illness.
5. A and partner are expecting a baby, but aren't quite prepared to tell anyone yet.
Try to see, and note, how your actions are modified by your imagined emotions.
Emotion through Action
Now, let us use this extract from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya to demonstrate the work which actors and director can do to explore emotion through action.
Play out the scene in a number of different ways:
1. Astrov and Yelena are madly in love with one another but have never had to say so.
2. Yelena loves Astrov madly but he seems oblivious to her charms.
3. Astrov finds Yelena boring but wants to use her as an intermediary in order to meet Sonya, her friend, with whom he is infatuated.
4. Yelena finds Astrov boring but wants to introduce him to Sonya who is infatuated with him.
5. Yelena lusts after Astrov but he is homosexual.
6. Everyone has told Astrov that Yelena loves him - except Yelena herself!
7. Yelena's husband is having an affair with Astrov's wife.
8. Astrov and Yelena were engaged to be married but are now happily married to others.
9. Yelena wants to ask Astrov to lend her some money but she's bored stiff by his maps!
How does each of these statements affect the way the piece is performed? How are the actions different? Work in pairs on one each of these scenarios, and present yours to the group.
Which is most convincing? Why?
Which is the "true" situation?
Enter ASTROV with a map.
ASTROV Good afternoon.
He shakes hands with her.
You wanted to see what I've been painting?
YELENA You promised yesterday you'd show me your work … Can you spare the time?
ASTROV Of course.
He spreads the map out on the card-table and fixes it with drawing pins.
Where were you born?
YELENA (Helps him.) St Petersburg.
ASTROV And where did you study?
YELENA At the Conservatoire.
ASTROV You may not find this very interesting.
YELENA Why not? I don't know the country, it's true, but I've read a lot.
ASTROV I've got my own work-table in the house here. In Vanya's room. When I get completely exhausted, and I can't think properly any more, I drop everything and come running over here to distract myself with this thing for an hour or two … Vanya and Sonya click away on the abacus, and I sit beside them at my table, busy with my colouring, and it's warm and peaceful, and the cricket chirps. I don't allow myself this pleasure very often, though - once a month … (Indicates the map.) Now, look at this. It represents this part of the country as it was fifty years ago. The light and dark green colouring indicates forest; half of the entire surface-area is forest. Where the green is hatched with red there were elk and wild goats … I've indicated the fauna as well as the flora. On this lake there were swans and geese and ducks, and what the old people call a power of birds of every sort - the place was swarming with them. Apart from the villages, look, you can see a scattering of various settlements and smallholdings, little monasteries, watermills … Cattle and horses were abundant. They're marked in blue. This district, for example, was thick with blue; there were complete herds, and two or three horses per farm. (Pause.) Now let's look down here. As it was twenty-five years ago. By this time only a third of the surface-area is under forest. The goats have gone, but there are still elk. The green and blue are paler now. And so on, and so on. Let us move on to the third section - the district as it is today. There's green here and there, but it's not solid, it's only in patches; the elk, the swans, and the capercaillies have all vanished … Of the former settlements, smallholdings, monasteries, and mills - not a trace. Overall it's the picture of a gradual but incontrovertible decline, which by the look of it will be complete in another ten or fifteen years. You'll tell me that civilizing factors are at work here, that the old life must naturally give way to the new. And, yes, I see that if these ruined forests had been replaced by roads and railways, if there were factories and schools here, then the peasants would be healthier and wealthier and wiser - but nothing of the kind! The district still has the same swamps and mosquitoes, the same lack of roads, the same poverty and typhus and diphtheria and fires … What we are faced with here is a decline resulting from the unequal struggle for existence, a decline brought about by stagnation, by ignorance, by a total lack of awareness, by frozen, sick, and hungry men who, to preserve the last flickers of life, to save their children, instinctively, blindly, grasp at anything they can use to relieve their hunger and warm themselves, and who destroy it all without thought for the morrow … Almost everything has been destroyed now; and nothing yet has been created in its place. (Coldly.) I see from your face that you're not interested.
YELENA I understand so little about it.
ASTROV There's nothing to understand - you're simply not interested.
YELENA I was thinking about something else, to tell you the truth. Forgive me.
(from Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, translated by Michael Frayn.)
Blood Wedding: Act One Scene Two
The second scene takes place in Leonardo's house, where his wife and her mother are singing a lullaby to a sleeping infant. Leonardo appears, and the news of the Bride's impending marriage provokes a sullen and angry mood in him. He responds with hostility to his Mother-in-law's questions about his long, unexplained absences from home, and finally, he storms out of the room, waking the baby as he goes. The scene begins and ends with a lullaby, but one whose imagery of frustration, apprehension and obstruction is as portentous as Leonardo's intense anger.
Reed Anderson (in Federico García Lorca, Macmillan).
from
Song of the Rider (1860)
In the black moon
of the highwaymen,
the spurs sing.
Little black horse,
where are you taking your dead rider?
… The hard spurs
of the motionless bandit,
his reins lost.
Little cold horse,
what a scent of knife-flowers!
In the black moon
the flanks of the Sierra Morena
were bleeding.
Little black horse,
where are you taking your dead rider?
Blood Wedding: Act One Scene Three
The final scene of act one takes place at the distant and isolated cave-house of the Bride. The formal negotiations of the wedding agreement are held between the Bridegroom's Mother and the Father of the Bride. The personal qualities that the Father praises in his daughter are actually those of a household servant and a bearer of offspring. The Bride then enters, solemn and quiet, and stands with her hands fallen 'in a modest pose' and with her head bowed. She responds laconically and obediently to the Mother's stern interrogation. … The Bride is submissive and dutiful in the presence of the Mother, her Father and the Bridegroom, but the final segment of the scene includes only the Bride and her Maidservant, and it reveals in the Bride a repressed strength of body and will that profoundly contradicts her behaviour only moments before. She bites her own hand in anger and frustration, and physically struggles with the servant who picks up one of the wedding gifts out of innocent curiosity. Finding herself the target of the girl's hostility, the servant elicits from her the confession that she is visited at night by Leonardo, and Lorca closes the act with the sound of the lover's horse approaching in the distance.
Reed Anderson (in Federico García Lorca, Macmillan).
Practical work: Tableaux in Act One
Pupils can choose six or seven key moments from Act One, and stage them as ‘frozen moments’ or tableaux. They must pay attention, of course, to posture and gesture, but also to facial expression.
You can develop this exercise by inviting other pupils to question those in the tableaux who will be asked to explain their gestures, etc, and to put into words what they are feeling, and why.
This exercise serves to summarise the content and methods of Act One.
Blood Wedding: Act Two Scene One
The second act’s opening scene brings the two lovers together on the morning of the Bride’s wedding day. The servant is preparing the Bride’s wedding costume and brushing her hair, but her chatter about the life of a married woman provokes only hostile and tense reactions form the Bride. The dialogue is abruptly cut off as Leonardo appears in the entryway. The illicit nature of the lovers’ relationship is dramatised now by the servant’s horror at Leonardo’s bold intrusion into the Bride’s house, and by the Bride’s defiant appearance before him dressed only in her petticoat. The scene between the two is filled with bitter accusations against one another for their respective marriages, and at the same time it is charged with an erotic energy that makes their separation seem unbearable and unnatural.
Reed Anderson (in Federico García Lorca, Macmillan)
The Guitar
The wail of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are broken.
The wail of the guitar
begins.
It is useless
to hush it.
Impossible
to hush it.
It weeps, monotonous
as water weeps,
as wind weeps
above the snowfall.
Impossible
to hush it
It weeps for things
far away.
Sand of the warm South
pleading for white camelias.
It weeps, like an arrow without a target,
an evening without dawn,
the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh. guitar!
Heart mangled
by five swords.
Practical Work: Tension
What are the ingredients of tension. Use pace and movement to build up tension in this scene. Note how, in both scenes in Act Two, Lorca gives ‘background’ characters a lot to say, or recite, or sing, to stress the irony between their perhaps rather naïve enjoyment of the wedding, and the Bride’s passion for a man who is already married to another.
Go through this first scene carefully and draw a graph of ‘tension’ against ‘time’. When do we feel the most tension and when the least? How can we bring this out in performance?
Blood Wedding: Act Two Scene Two
The rest of the act takes place outside the Bride's house during the wedding celebration. The opening scene has released the erotic current that will flow steadily beneath the surface of the entire act, finally inundating the stage at the end and sweeping all the characters towards the play's catastrophic denouement in the third act. Lorca calls for the wedding guests to fill the stage with traditional singing and dancing as the community innocently and gracefully honours the new husband and wife. … The dialogue among the principal characters is punctuated by indications of the Bride's tense anxiety and the Mother's growing apprehension that the union is doomed to disaster. The festival serves as an ironic background to what is now becoming the most compelling movement of the dramatic plot, that is, towards an action that will in some way resolve the lovers' desperate situation. … Throughout the act, Lorca has maintained the primary movement of the action towards the accomplishment of the marriage. All the while, he has been building beneath the surface the potential contradictory movement of the action to the point where it finally overwhelms the main momentum and replaces it with a new and fatally doomed movement towards the union of the two lovers.
Once the flight of the lovers has taken place, the Mother is confronted with the discovery that her deepest fears about this marriage have proved true.
Reed Anderson (in Federico García Lorca, Macmillan)
Practical work: Monologues.
The Mother's final speeches in this Act serve as a key moment for an understanding of her character. On the one hand, she wants her only surviving son to avenge on the Felix family the retribution which she thinks is deserved after years of feuding; on the other hand, she is frightened in the deepest way imaginable that in his desire to wreak violent revenge on Leonardo, her son will himself be killed, leaving her not only defeated, but alone.
Her speech dramatises this climax; we can see just how well it articulates the two most important motives in her life.
As an actor preparing a role for Blood Wedding, you might prepare a monologue for your character, using just lines from the play but reassembling them, and omitting those which serve more to further plot than to evoke character. You might also have to omit lines that are too firmly tied to a specific situation or listener.
What does our final ‘artificial’ monologue tell us about the character of the Mother?
Create a monologue from the text for a character of your choice and work (with a partner acting as director) at a performance of it.
A Monologue for the Mother.
(Muttering.) Damn the knife, damn them all and the devil who brought them into the world. … knives … guns … pistols, (Stronger now) even the sickle and the scythe … anything that can slice through a man's body. An angel of a man, in the flower of his life, going out to the vines or the olive groves, because they're his, his family's … and then he just doesn't come back. Or if he does, it's only so that you can lay out his body, and rub it with salt so it doesn't bloat in the heat.
If I were to live another hundred years I couldn't say enough. How can something so small, a gun, a knife, bring down a bull of a man? The months trail past, and the pain still stings my eyes and pulls at my hair. … And my two dead boys lie silent, slowly filling with grass, turning to dust; two men who were like two flowers … and their killers, cool and fresh in prison, gazing at the mountains.
He was so strong … good blood. His father only had to look at a woman and she would fall pregnant. That's the way it should be. Men … life.
Whenever I hear her name, it's like being struck with a stone.
I didn't look at anyone until I met your father. And when the Felix murdered him, I looked straight ahead at the wall. One woman with one man, and nothing else.
In the three years we were married he planted ten cherry trees (Recalling.) and the three walnut trees down by the mill, a whole vineyard and a Jupiter plant, the sort that gives bright crimson flowers. But it dried up.
My son is handsome. He has never known a woman; he is as clean and pure as a sheet in the sun.
Do you know what marriage is? It's a man and his children, and a thick stone wall to keep the rest of the world out.
Even the blood flowing in my veins seems to ache. And all I can see is the hand that struck down my husband and son … You think I'm crazy, don't you? Well, if I am it's because I've locked too much away. But I'm screaming inside all the time, because I know who should be punished, and I know who really deserves the shroud. And they just come and they take your dead away, and you've got to stop screaming. And then the gossips start.
Men come and go like the wind. They've got to carry knives and guns. But girls never even need to set foot in the street.
When I got to my son, he was lying in the middle of the street, and I soaked my hands in his blood, and licked them with my tongue. Because it was mine as well. Can you understand that? And if I could I would take that dust red with his blood and put it into a crystal cup.
My head is full of memories of my men and the fights they fought.
Always be affectionate with your wife, but if you think she's getting too starry-eyed or too sour, then caress her just so that it hurts … a bruising hug or a bite, and then a gentle kiss. She won't take it amiss, and she'll know exactly who's who, who gives the orders and who takes them. That's how your father taught me.
The days to come will be terrible days.
A woman with not a single child to raise to her lips.
Nothing matters but the wheat my sons lie under and the rain that washes their faces, and God himself who has laid them to rest.
Let them put a cross of bitter oleander on your breast, a sheet of shining silk to cover you; let the water weep between your still hands.
The cross. The cross.
Neighbours, it was with a knife, just a little knife, that on the appointed day between two and three, two men in love killed each other. With a knife, just a little knife, that fits snug in the hand and slices so quickly through the startled flesh to stop at the point where the dark root of the scream lies trembling enmeshed.
It fits so snug in the hand, but slices so quick through the startled flesh and there it stops, at the point where, trembling enmeshed, lies the dark root of the scream.
Blood Wedding: Act Three Scene One
When the curtain rises on the third act, Lorca has abandoned the stylised realism of the first two acts in favour of a supernatural exploration of the symbolic terms of the drama. … At risk is the loss of all the dramatic tension built up in the previous act, but it seems that Lorca wished to build up a tension now on an entirely different level. The Woodcutters comprise the conventional tragic chorus and their severe dialogue orients the spectator's emotions to the exact terms of the tragic action about to take place. …
The Moon appears onstage dressed as a young woodcutter with a white face, illuminating the forest with blue light; he sings a ballad of death, and when he disappears, an old Beggar Woman Death in disguise, comes on to the wooded scene calling for the moonlight to return so that she can seek out her victims. …
Adding to the intensity of the symbolic forest scene is the breathless dialogue between the fleeing lovers. This is a scene of erotic rapture played out almost literally in the shadow of death.
Reed Anderson (in Federico García Lorca, Macmillan)
The Fight
In the middle of the valley
the Albacete knives
gleam like fishes, beautiful
with blood of enemies.
A hard light, like playing-cards,
outlines on sour green
infuriated horses
and the profiles of the men.
In the crown of an olive
two old women weep.
Up the walls is climbing
the bull of the fight.
Dark angels carried melted
snow and handkerchieves.
Angels with great wings
of Albacete knives.
Juan Antonio of Montilla
rolls down the slope dead,
his body full of iris,
pomegranate on his head.
Now he rides a fiery cross
along death’s road.
The judge, with the Civil Guard
comes through the olive grove.
A quiet song is moaning
from the snake of sliding blood.
‘Gentlemen of the Civil Guard,
it’s the same tale always.
Here we have four Romans dead
and five Carthaginians.’
The afternoon, mad with hot
rumours, and fig trees,
faints across the horsemen’s
lacerated thighs.
And dark angels flew
through the air of the west.
Angels with long hair
and olive-oil hearts.
Blood Wedding: Act Three Scene Two
The final scene is almost another act in itself. It opens with a second choral passage where two young girls dressed in dark blue are winding a skein of red yarn against a background of stark white walls. The setting is the Mother's house, but it is meant now to suggest a church, a place where ritual is appropriate. … The girls are speaking in a chanting rhythm, speculating to one another about what may have taken place after the wedding; a third girl appears to announce the approach of the women, and of the men bearing the bodies. The Beggarwoman from the forest scene now appears and she confirms to the girls the deaths of the two young men.
From this point on, the scene is purely elegiac. … The women mourn together, but they are ultimately isolated from one another by their own individual experiences of the tragedy. …
The three women brought together at the end on this glaring white stage symbolically become one. The Mother is at the end of her life, alone; the Bride, in the beginning of her womanhood and widowed on her wedding day, is also alone, but neither wife nor a mother; Leonardo's Wife is … a widow who will repeat the pattern of the widowed Mother.
Reed Anderson (in Federico García Lorca, Macmillan)
The Song of the Mother of Amargo
They carry him in my sheet
my laurels and my palm.
On the twenty-seventh of August
with a little knife of gold.
The cross. And we go walking!
He was dark and bitter.
Neighbours, give me a bottle
of brass with lemonade.
The cross. Don't let anyone weep!
Amargo is in the moon.
Practical work: Flamenco and Dance.
Try to watch Carlos Saura's film of the flamenco ballet adaptation of Blood Wedding. He shows clearly how the simple tragic tale is as one with the spirit of flamenco; with its pain, with its passions; with its with-held eroticism.
Curiously, perhaps, Saura declines to present Act 3. There are no Woodcutters: scene one is reduced to a stylised knife-fight. There is no mourning: scene two is reduced to one despairing gesture from the Bride.
Using flamenco music and ideas from the film, devise mime or dance performances of scenes one and two from Act Three.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Texts
Blood Wedding F García Lorca Hodder & Stoughton
(trans D Johnston)
Selected Poems F García Lorca Bloodaxe Books
(trans M Williams)
Four Major Plays F García Lorca Oxford World’s Classics
Books about Lorca and his work
Federico García Lorca Reed Anderson Macmillan
Federico García Lorca: A Life Ian Gibson Faber and Faber
Lorca: The Theatre Beneath the Sand Gwynne Edwards Marion Byars
Books about Spain and Andalusia
South from Granada Gerald Brenan Penguin
A Rose for Winter Laurie Lee Penguin
Lorca's Granada Ian Gibson Faber
The introductory biographical sketch is from the programme to a production of Blood Wedding by the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, directed by Lawrence Till.
BLOOD WEDDING
by Federico García Lorca
You need to know:
what happens in the play,
in as much detail as possible
so as to be able to refer quickly and accurately to key scenes;
something about Andalusian life in the 1920s and 30s;
something about Lorca's life and literary aims;
something about Lorca's drama as performed in his lifetime.
You need to be able to:
analyse character in the play;
identify how relationships are used by Lorca to develop characters;
see how Lorca uses both realism and symbolism to achieve his ends,
and perhaps to suggest ways in which this mixture of realism and symbolism
could be handled in an actual performance/ production;
identify the main themes of the play,
and perhaps suggest ways of clarifying and establishing these in performance;
identify problems the play would pose for a director or an actor
and find imaginative solutions;
articulate the response you would want an audience to make to a production of Blood Wedding.
You need to read and study:
the text;
the books by and about Lorca on the reading list provided;
your own notes, particularly of practical lessons, and your essays.
BLOOD WEDDING: Sensitivity to Language
We want to look here at the way a translator has to match the literary elements of language to more colloquial elements, so that a play is both absorbing and convincing.
Blood Wedding, of course, was written originally in Spanish; by looking at two different translations, we can explore how different translators have confronted this problem.
Read in your translation the dialogue following Leonardo's entry, until his abrupt departure.
How does the kind of language which Leonardo uses suggest his agitation and unease? What advice would you give to an actor playing this part?
Where, do you think, are there lines which are particularly good examples of the colloquial? Which lines sound to you less convincingly realistic? Try to say what reasons there might be for the differences between the two different kinds of line.
Now look at this same section, translated by James Graham-Luján and Richard L. O'Connell (1946):
LEONARDO Where's the baby?
WIFE He's sleeping.
LEONARDO Yesterday he wasn't well. He cried during the night.
WIFE Today he's like a dahlia. And you? Were you at the blacksmith's?
LEONARDO I've just come from there. Would you believe it? For more than two months he's been putting new shoes on the horse and they're always coming off. As far as I can see he pulls them off on the stones.
WIFE Couldn't just be that you use him so much?
LEONARDO No. I almost never use him.
WIFE Yesterday the neighbours told me they'd seen you on the far side of the plains.
LEONARDO Who said that?
WIFE The women who gather capers. It certainly surprised me. Was it you?
LEONARDO No. What would I be doing there, in that wasteland?
WIFE That's what I said. But the horse was streaming sweat.
LEONARDO Did you see him?
WIFE No. Mother did.
LEONARDO Is she with the baby?
WIFE Yes. Do you want some lemonade?
LEONARDO With good cold water.
WIFE And then you didn't come to eat!
LEONARDO I was with the wheat weighers. They always hold me up.
WIFE (very tenderly, while she makes the lemonade)
Did they pay you a good price?
LEONARDO Fair.
WIFE I need a new dress and the baby a bonnet with ribbons.
LEONARDO (Getting up)
I'm going to take a look at him.
WIFE Be careful. He's asleep.
MOTHER-IN-LAW (coming in)
Well! Who's been racing the horse that way? He's down there, worn out, his eyes popping from their sockets as though he'd come from the ends of the earth.
LEONARDO (Acidly) I have.
MOTHER-IN-LAW Oh, excuse me! He's your horse.
WIFE (Timidly) He was at the wheat buyers.
MOTHER-IN-LAW He can burst for all of me.
(She sits down. Pause.)
Do you get the same impression of Leonardo from both translations?
Find examples of where you think one extract uses language more colloquially, and perhaps, therefore, more effectively, than the other. Ignoring other (important) aspects of the translator's work - keeping the tone and flavour of the original, trying to suggest the rhythms of foreign or local dialect, for example - which do you think would be the script you would choose if preparing to perform the play? Why?
Remember, you'll have to look very closely at small details of the translation to do this well; your points will need short but carefully analysed quotations. Make points clearly; don't just generalise.
BLOOD WEDDING: Questions on Act Two
1. The Act begins with Leonardo visiting the Bride on the morning of her wedding; it ends with the two of them fleeing together on Leonardo's horse. How does the first section of Act 2 scene i (from the beginning to Leonardo's exit on page 61) prepare us for the dramatic end to scene ii?
2. How does Lorca create, maintain and increase the tension in this act?
3. Look at the end of scene i where Leonardo and his Wife are left alone. How would you stage this extract to bring out their characters best at this point in the story. Give your reasons.
4. Show how the final moments of Act Two scene ii are crucial for our understanding of the character of the Mother.
BLOOD WEDDING
Act One, Scene One
PLOT
Mother has a feud with the Felixes;
her husband and son murdered;
the second son is now getting married;
bride (to be) has been Leonardo (Felix)'s girlfriend;
Bride's mother appears to have been unfaithful.
CHARACTER
Mother
- worries about son;
- curses knives; hates weapons; obsessed;
- can't forgive Felixes;
- very protective of son;
- unsure about wedding;
- traditionalist;
- widow;
- concerned about Bride's previous relationship with Leonardo;
- hides herself away;
- isolation.
Bridegroom
- works hard;
- bought a vineyard;
- loves his mother;
- seems very close;
- frustrated by mother going on about knives and the Felixes.
BLOOD WEDDING
Act One, Scene Two
PLOT
Mother-in-law and Wife sing a symbolic lullaby;
we are introduced to Leonardo;
Wife asks him about where he's been;
there is an argument about the horse;
a girl brings news about the wedding and the luxuries the Bridegroom's family have bought;
Leonardo storms off;
the baby wakes, lullaby repeated
CHARACTER
Leonardo
- snappy temper ;
- agitated;
- seems obsessed/ preoccupied by Bride;
- abrupt way of speaking;
- cf horse in lullaby (symbolism);
- bitter;
- tension with Mother-in-law;
- jealous about wedding & Bridegroom's wealth.
Wife
- timid;
- reluctant to take issue with Leonardo;
- careful not to annoy him;
- wants him to love her;
- close to tears;
- loyal to Leonardo.
Mother-in-law
- abrupt;
- nosy;
- not afraid to criticise Leonardo;
- cynical about wedding.
BLOOD WEDDING
Act One, Scene Three
PLOT
Mother meets Father (of Bride) & the Bride herself at the cavehouse four hours away;
Very formal- like a business meeting;
Talk is about land, money and the qualities of children - almost like a slave auction;
gifts; uncomfortable hospitality;
Mother and Bridegroom leave (as the Father shows them out) and the Bride fights with servant about i) the presents, and ii) Leonardo's visits on horseback;
the scene ends with the sound of (Leonardo's) horse whinnying.
CHARACTER
Bride
violent;
moody;
defensive at mention of Leonardo;
no passion in love for Bridegroom;
mystery about her relationship with Leonardo;
shows one side of her character to Mother, Father and Bridegroom, another to servant;
proud.
Mother
still obsessed with knives;
still protective and proud of son;
'cold' idea of marriage;
concerned about wealth and inheritance.
Father
sees marriage as a business transaction, convenient;
wants to be wealthy ("Buy!");
speaks well of his daughter.
BLOOD WEDDING
Act Two, Scenes One and Two
PLOT
Hair do in the dawn;
Leonardo arrives early;
we learn about Leonardo's poverty having stopped his marriage to the Bride;
Bride really still wants Leonardo, though she tries to suppress that feeling;
Leonardo expresses his love for the Bride;
Servant is appalled by their informality and by what they are saying;
Leonardo and Bride act out a (false) farewell;
we can tell through the introduction of the (singing) guests that society expects her to marry.
The servant prepares the wedding feast while the others have gone to the church;
after the guests return, the tension gradually increases, with people crossing and recrossing the stage, until the climax is reached when the Wife screams out that Leonardo and the Bride have fled on the horse;
the Mother instigates the chase.
SPECTACLE: singing/ dancing/ formal greetings.
CHARACTER
Mother
still on about the Felixes;
Leonardo
oblivious to all except the Bride;
a sullen presence at the wedding;
Wife
genuinely pleased about wedding - greets Bride;
(at end of scene one) seems worried about her own marriage;
gets quite forceful, stands up to Leonardo; he does what she wants;
becomes hysterical when she discovers that her husband has run off with the Bride;
Servant
almost like a mother to the Bride;
prepared to face Bride with unpleasant facts;
she's astute; she knows what's going on between B & L;
"hypocritical humility" of scene one become gentler as she teases the Bridegroom about marriage;
enjoys talking about sex.
Bridegroom
attempts at love talk are embarrassingly stilted;
doesn't seem to be very independent;
cool and distant towards bride despite an attempt to tease her about sex.
BLOOD WEDDING
Act Three, Scene One
PLOT
Leonardo and the Bride are running away, pursued by the Bridegroom;
in the moonlight, both Leonardo and Bridegroom die in a knife-fight.
SYMBOLISM
Lorca uses Beggarwoman to symbolise death;
a character to represent a personification of the moon;
woodcutters to comment on both sides of the story;
stage symbolism (at the end) to represent the deaths;
violins to represent the forest;
verse for Bride and Leonardo.
CHARACTER
Bridegroom
"The strength... of my father and my brother." (p88)
Leonardo
Loving;
"It's not me who's to blame." (p92);
Persuasive.
Bride
"I love you. I love you. But leave me alone." (p91)
BLOOD WEDDING
Act Three, Scene Two
PLOT
Leonardo and the Bridegroom are dead, but we here only fragments about the fight; rumours and half-stories.
The Beggarwoman gloats, and girls gossip.
Women gather at the Mother’s house - which looks like a church -
to join her in mourning.
When the Bride enters, bloodied and soiled,there is a sense of shock
and a violent tension between her and the Mother,
which the Bride’s insistence on her own purity merely exacerbates;
they fight;
the Mother allows the Bride to mourn with her but ‘at the door’.
The Bride’s excuses reveal her passion for Leonardo.
The play ends with an elegy for the dead and an almost explicitly religious mood.
Only women appear in this scene.
CHARACTER
Mother
Firm, resigned, angry, sorrowful;
but yet almost pleased that matters have been resolved.
Leonardo’s Wife
Loving;
forgiving;
she speaks a beautiful elegy for Leonardo;
in the same position now as the Mother was before the play began?
Bride
Despairing;
truly alone and without hope.
Two Poems by Federico García Lorca
The Moon Comes Out
When the moon comes out
the bells fade into silence
and impenetrable paths
come to light.
When the moon comes out
the sea floods earth’s surface,
the heart feels like an island
in the infinite.
Nobody eats oranges
under the full moon.
The right thing is to eat
only green and icy fruit.
When the moon comes out,
one hundred identical faces,
your silver coins
weep in your pocket.
He Died at Dawn
Night of four moons,
one solitary tree,
one solitary shadow,
one solitary bird.
I seek in my flesh
the traces of your lips.
The fountain kisses the wind
without touching it.
I carry the No you gave me
in the palm of my hand
like a wax lemon
almost without colour.
Night of four moons,
one solitary tree.
Upon the point of a pin
my love is spinning.
‘Blood Wedding’:
Some Suggestions for Overview Exercises
Pupils work in pairs to produce (illustrated) posters illuminating the roles of the different characters, looking at the parts each character plays in the story, the key moments which reveal the inner conflicts, and offer advice to an actor playing the part. (An example - Leonardo - is included here.)
Pupils work in groups to discuss the way they’d direct, design and present a production of ‘Blood Wedding’ and go on - collaboratively or as individuals - to produce a programme for an imagined production. They could also write a review of an imagined production. To do this well, they will need to look at good examples of theatre programmes - not necessarily of ‘Blood Wedding’ of course - and at reviews. Examples of reviews of ‘Blood Wedding’ are included here.
This exercise could lead on to the production of director’s notes where pupils annotate key episodes with suggestions for staging and performance.
A number of Lorca’s poems - with themes related in some way to the play - are included here. Pupils might be asked to make a dramatic presentation of some of Lorca’s poems.
Starting with the two Lorca poems ‘The Moon Comes Out’ and ‘He Died at Dawn’ pupils could choose episodes from the play and write original poems to illustrate these key moments in as intense a way as they can.
Symbolism is important in ‘Blood Wedding’; pupils could design and make two- or three-dimensional collages to illustrate some of the key symbols.
Apart from Carlos Saura’s influential flamenco dance version, there is no film or tv adaptation of ‘Blood Wedding’; pupils could work in groups on designing a film or tv adaptation and ‘storyboard’ a typical episode to illustrate their approach.
Blood Wedding
Federico García Lorca
Workbook