Interview - Róisín McBrinn: Director gets her break on the big stage with Lorca’s tragic tale

THERE wasn’t a lot that Federico Garcia Lorca didn’t know about human life being crushed by the stifling customs and rigid social and political rules of 1930s Spain.

In 1936, at the age of 38, the poet and playwright was assassinated at the hands of a Franco death squad during the bloody opening months of the Spanish Civil War. He left behind some of the most women-centred plays in dramatic history, work that showed a true empathy with the female psyche and the passions that drive it.

Yerma, the third in Lorca’s celebrated and tragic Trilogy of Rural Life (following Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba), yet again showed Lorca as not so much a feminist but as a writer who, like Ibsen and Chekhov, used women to analyse mankind’s problems and dilemmas.

He had a deep understanding of the potential cost to a woman’s psyche of surrendering to convention. In Yerma’s case, she craves a child which her husband cannot give her. Choked by loneliness and despair at a life stretching out before her in which she will never have a family, and unable to flout social mores by having a child by another man, she is driven to free herself from an untenable situation over which she has no control.

Yerma, the first of Lorca’s plays to be produced by West Yorkshire Playhouse, and in a new translation by Ursula Rani Sarma, is the first main stage production to be directed by the Quercus Award-winning Róisín McBrinn.

The 33-year-old from Dublin is the first winner (out of 163 applicants) of the award, offered in association with the WYP and National Theatre Studio to enable young directors to make the leap from the Fringe to working on main stages by providing the financial and creative support needed to direct a full-scale production.

Yerma seems to be a perfect fit for McBrinn, who studied Spanish and Drama at Trinity College, Dublin before setting up her own company to premiere plays from abroad that had not been produced in Ireland.

“I realised quite early on that acting wasn’t my forte,” she says. “I was too aware of everything else that was going on around me and interested in the wider picture of how it’s all put together.”

A huge breakthrough came when she was chosen as resident assistant director at London’s Donmar Warehouse, under the tutelage of Michael Grandage.

“Michael is an extraordinary storyteller and an amazing mentor. I couldn’t have been luckier and more pleased, because it’s an apprenticeship they give in recognition of passion, commitment and potential.

“My theatrical tastebuds blossomed there, doing lots of reinvented classics with talent like Michael Sheen in Caligula and Michael Marber’s After Miss Julie. I thought, wrongly, that I could just walk out of there and direct anything.”

Another great opportunity arose when Kathy Burke invited McBrinn to work with her on The Quare Fellow at Oxford Stage Company. Roisin went on to direct JB Keane’s The Field for Tricycle Theatre. Her other work includes casting, producing and directing Adam Rapp’s Gompers.

“My ambition is to keep doing work that interests me, with talented people I can learn from.

“The opportunity to come to the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the biggest subsidised theatre I have worked in, is such an amazing chance to take a big step forward.

“I’ve tried not to view the play as a feminist work, but more as one person’s struggle to overcome an insurmountable problem. Her foes are not all necessarily societal – some of them are to do with her own nature, body and psyche. A woman who wants a child and can’t have one – in any society – is what it’s about, but beyond that it is about anyone who has ever passionately wanted anything and found it was beyond their reach.”

Until March 26. Box office 0113 213 7700.