The Australian writer-director Simon Stone has created a new play based on Federico García Lorca’s Yerma that aims to “liberate” the original from its cultural context. Stone took a similar line with Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, seen at the Barbican in 2014. But, while Billie Piper gives a breathtakingly uninhibited performance as Stone’s protagonist, the result lacks the metaphorical power of Lorca’s austere classic.
Piper plays a character simply labelled “Her”. Presumably she is meant to be a modern everywoman. In fact, she is the well-off lifestyle editor of a national paper. When we first meet her, aged 33, her overwhelming desire is to have children; that of her Aussie partner, John, is to make money. In the course of 100 minutes, Piper registers every phase of the character’s mounting despair with stark clarity. Piper’s expressive features, which can switch in a second from incandescent rage to incipient tears, tell us all we need to know about a woman tormented by her sister’s fertility, her partner’s recalcitrance and the remorseless ticking of the biological clock. Even though we view the action through designer Lizzie Clachan’s rectangular perspex box, Piper gives a bravura display that bares the character’s soul.
Stone’s updated rewrite, however, drastically limits the play. Lorca’s 1934 original is a rural tragedy about a socially imprisoned woman mocked by nature’s fruitfulness; Stone’s version is an urban drama about a privileged heroine who has access to every modern aid including IVF treatment. Given the purported radicalism of Piper’s character, you also wonder why she subscribes to the notion that child-bearing is the ultimate source of female fulfilment.
The piece is well performed not only by Piper but by Brendan Cowell as her uneasy partner, Maureen Beattie as her withdrawn mother, and John MacMillan as an ex-lover who declines to become a surrogate father. But, in uprooting Lorca’s fable from its context, Stone simply gives us a display of unrelieved psychological angst.
•At the Young Vic, London, until 24 September. Box office: 020-7922 2923.
