One of the successes of last season in the Fabià Puigserver room of the Teatre Lliure was Yerma by Federico García Lorca directed by Juan Carlos Martel, with scenery by Frederic Amat and music by Refree. The production was also presented in Madrid, at the National Dramatic Center, and toured. Martel confessed at the time that he “needed to set up a Lorca.” As director of the Teatre Lliure he has the power to direct any production, and he opted for this reference Lorca.
In June 2024 he was scheduled to direct a version of the Odyssey, also with music by Refree, but in the end it will not be done. The revival of Yerma, therefore, also means his farewell at the helm of Barcelona's public theater, which concludes this winter, and it will be Julio Manrique who will take over.
Yerma is the story of a woman who cannot have children, and with Bodas de sangre and La casa de Bernarda Alba they form the rural trilogy that García Lorca wrote in the 1930s. “I take refuge in Lorca and I have wanted to develop it out of real and human need, in accordance with my current state of mind,” said the director at the time, perhaps in reference to his resignation as head of the Teatre Lliure.
Martel also recalled his collaboration with Lluís Pasqual in the production that he directed of The House of Bernarda Alba: “I discarded this work because I would not have known how to get the musicality of Núria Espert and Rosa Maria Sardà out of my ear.”
Amat, responsible for the set design, agreed to collaborate with Martel with one condition: that he not use videos. The artist was Fabià Puigserver's assistant in 1971, when he set up Yerma with Espert. Now, his scenographic proposal “evokes a territory full of ash, where an oval structure rises from which fabrics hang that veil and reveal the scene, creating a movement that has something of a cinematographic and transit sequence. It has a zoetrope element, which is the beginning of cinema,” explains Amat.
This Yerma was the Teatre Lliure's first production of a work by Lorca, which settled “an outstanding debt,” declared Martel when this production premiered in November 2022.
The work is presented at the Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc from December 21 to January 4, with Pep Ambròs, María Hervás, David Menéndez, Miriam Moukhles, Marta Ossó, Isabel Rocatti and Carla Schilt.
