(Photograph by Johan Persson)
The Young Vic's adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca's "Yerma" has a lot going for it. To start with, it has Billie Piper -- seen above in chirpy flirtation with her partner. The play is staged in a glass box (with two barely noticeable side openings), so it feels as if you're observing the characters in a fish bowl. Set changes are like magic tricks: one minute you're looking at a plushly carpeted and furnished interior; seconds later (after a brief moment of darkness), the stage becomes one long patch of grass.
"Yerma" focuses on a woman's desperate quest for motherhood. It's not a play you see performed often on Europe's stages. Lorca has spiced up the original with a couple of surprise plot twists.
The Young Vic brings the whole thing up to date. From early-20th-century Spain, we fast-forward to early-21st-century London and the trappings of middle-class London life: the properly ladder, Uber, Deliveroo, and IVF. Billie Piper acts her guts out on stage, sparing nothing in her portrayal of the barren woman. And her performance rings absolutely true. No female audience member emerges unmoved from it. In fact, the ones I saw on the way out were invariably teary.
The trouble is the play itself. It's grimly one-dimensional; the only way is down. The few dramatic surprises that Lorca introduced in the original have been excised. What we're left with is the tedium of watching a London bohemian bourgeoise descend into emotional meltdown.
Piper will definitely nab trophies for her performance in this, and so, no doubt, will the director Simon Stone. But I wouldn't give the play itself too many rewards -- especially not in its Young Vic modernization.
The Young Vic's adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca's "Yerma" has a lot going for it. To start with, it has Billie Piper -- seen above in chirpy flirtation with her partner. The play is staged in a glass box (with two barely noticeable side openings), so it feels as if you're observing the characters in a fish bowl. Set changes are like magic tricks: one minute you're looking at a plushly carpeted and furnished interior; seconds later (after a brief moment of darkness), the stage becomes one long patch of grass.
"Yerma" focuses on a woman's desperate quest for motherhood. It's not a play you see performed often on Europe's stages. Lorca has spiced up the original with a couple of surprise plot twists.
The Young Vic brings the whole thing up to date. From early-20th-century Spain, we fast-forward to early-21st-century London and the trappings of middle-class London life: the properly ladder, Uber, Deliveroo, and IVF. Billie Piper acts her guts out on stage, sparing nothing in her portrayal of the barren woman. And her performance rings absolutely true. No female audience member emerges unmoved from it. In fact, the ones I saw on the way out were invariably teary.
The trouble is the play itself. It's grimly one-dimensional; the only way is down. The few dramatic surprises that Lorca introduced in the original have been excised. What we're left with is the tedium of watching a London bohemian bourgeoise descend into emotional meltdown.
Piper will definitely nab trophies for her performance in this, and so, no doubt, will the director Simon Stone. But I wouldn't give the play itself too many rewards -- especially not in its Young Vic modernization.
