Federico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding is a play of elemental things; birth, blood, land, betrayal and revenge. It is also suffused with lyricism and imagery, in a blend unique to its author.
This combination does not make it an easy work to bring convincingly to the non-Spanish stage, but the production currently at The Crypt, despite being done on a frayed shoestring, gets to the work's throbbing pulse.
Set in sun-baked Andalusia, the story is the tragedy of a bride who flees her father's house immediately after her wedding, to escape with a former lover who, in turn, deserts his wife and child to be with her.
Neither of the fugitives had intended so to flout the honour of their houses, puppets to their passions. Only blood can purge their sin, and it does.
This sense of inevitability, of men and women in thrall to fate, dominates the story from the start, in the first act of heightened realism and the second of surreal metaphor.
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