Juan Carlos Martel confesses that "he needed to set up a Lorca". Due to this need, which appeared during the pandemic, the director of the Teatre Lliure chose Yerma from his classic repertoire, the story of a woman who cannot have children, which, with Bodas de sangre and La casa de Bernarda Alba, forms the rural trilogy that García Lorca wrote in the thirties.
“I take refuge in Lorca and now I wanted to develop it out of real and human need, in accordance with my current state of mind,” says the director. I acted as assistant director with Lluís Pasqual in La casa de Bernarda Alba and I discarded it because I wouldn't have known how to get the musicality of Núria Espert and Rosa Maria Sardà out of my ear”.
For such an undertaking, Martel has sought "the best complicity". And it can be said that he has achieved it, because the artistic record is dazzling. The stage space is signed by Frederic Amat, the music is by Raül Refree, the movement is the responsibility of Lali Ayguadé and the cast is led by María Hervás, accompanied by Joan Amargós, David Menéndez, Bàrbara Mestanza, Isabel Rocatti, Yolanda Sey and Camila Viyuela.
This Yerma is the first own production of a work by Lorca, with which the Teatre Lliure "repays an outstanding debt," says Martel. With this show, its director wants "each one of us to project our fears onto the characters" and our frustrations with the corsets that constrain us.
In the presentation press conference, Amat recalled that he was Fabià Puigserver's assistant in 1971, when he staged Yerma con Espert, and declared that taking this same work in 2022 to the room of the Teatre Lliure that bears its name affects him " sentimentally".
His scenographic proposal “evokes a territory full of ash, where an oval structure rises from which some fabrics hang that veil and reveal the scene, creating a movement that has something of a cinematographic sequence and transit,” he explained. It has a zoetrope element, which is the beginning of cinema.”
Amat accepted Martel's invitation on one condition: that he not use videos. With his wish granted, what Amat highlights most of his work is “a theater on four sides, so that the public is very close”. And he concludes: “Here is a Yerma de Cámara”.
"At a time like the present, full of environmental, feminist and socioeconomic struggles that the system represses," says Martel, Yerma's struggle makes perfect sense, because it is "of a woman who sprouts life from every pore and does not find more than death."
This Friday, the 18th, when this new production opens at the Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc, its protagonist, María Hervás, will have a double debut: she will perform for the first time in Barcelona and it will be her first Lorca. And she confesses that she has become a lorcaaholic. But it has not been easy: "It has been hard and ambitious work because I want to move all of you when you come to see the play and you leave different from how you came."
For his part, Mestanza adds: “I thought that Yerma was telling the story of a woman who cannot have children, but it is not like that: she is looking for a child as she could look for something else, she is looking for a life so as not to die. Because the play talks about the revolution, a revolution that is still not finished today, about what happens when we don't settle and want something more. Looking for a child is looking for life”.
Rocatti, in the role of the Old Woman, analyzes: “The tragedy lies in the men who are forced to live as men and the women who are forced to live as women. Within some rules that constrain them and that my character manages to cheat with a way of being in life based on the joy of life”.
And Sey adds: “Lorca shows us many types of women and other ways of living. He raises the difficulty of getting out of gender roles, because everything is done so that you don't get out of that circle.
Lorca's work is "like those lullabies that comfort children but are made to warn us of the dangers that surround us," concludes Martel. Yerma will be at the Teatre Lliure until December 16. In Madrid it can be seen in 2023 at the National Dramatic Center, and then the production directed by Martel will begin a tour.
