PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Blood Wedding

Blood Wedding - Metta Theatre

Southwark Playhouse

Under the railway arches, Southwark Playhouse hosts a wedding party for a young couple. You enter either as the bride's or the groom's guest. Dress code? Colourful. You will be greeted with a glass of juice and handed a piece of paper that has the order of service and lyrics of a couple of songs.

So expect some singing and party affair, in Metta Theatre's re-contextualised Blood Wedding by Frederico Garcia Lorca. Piano, guitar, percussion and glockenspiel make up a live band playing engaging and jazzy tunes that sets a central American atmosphere. The audience is led to sing and dance to celebrate, but the sound of the trains above quickly transports us to a clammy space where, on the wedding day, the new couple and their family confront family histories and unsettled passions.

While the original story itself is full of symbolism, this production places knife-crime as its central theme, and sets to share Lorca's words with contemporary London audience, where knife-crime is increasingly becoming a social reality.

The company's talented performers give fervent speeches, and all accompany themselves with either singing or musical instruments, as they dig deeper into their characters' flaws and conscience. Naomi Wirthner's powerful performance as The Mother is impressive, and her voice and singing provide an underlying fear that echoes throughout the show. As the show progresses, the emotional richness compounds, and the wedding decor becomes redundant.

Southwark Playhouse's heavy and blackened brickwork provides a challenging architecture for the designers. But under Poppy Buton-Morgan's direction all ingredients seem to blend and just manage to capture the orchidaceous ambience that is vivid in Lorca's writing. Stabbings and murder are recurring subjects, however, the accents of the performers, their costumes, and the overall ambience contribute to an ambiguous time and place, which contradict the relevance that the show strives to convey. Indeed, it creates a fresh angle to the story, but perhaps with a little more reference to here and now.

A unique wedding that invites you to be part of. Take a friend with you, or you will be less compelled to dance and will be left alone at the reception that follows.

Ingrid Hu

Blood Wedding runs until 15th August