Review: Yerma *****

FEDERICO Garcia Lorca’s play Yerma examines the effect on the human psyche of being consumed by a yearning that may never be satisfied.

In this case Kate Stanley-Brennan, in a wonderfully visceral performance as Yerma, conveys vividly and instantly both her free spirit and her burning desire for a child, a baby she may never know, because her husband appears to be impotent.

Director Róisín McBrinn’s beautifully handled rendition of Ursula Rani Sarma’s new translation of the Spanish play transposes the piece from the Andalucia of the 1930s to somewhere in Ireland, for reasons that are not clear, but the parallels – including straitjacketing by the Catholic church – are there.

Yerma (the name means barren) is as stymied by the overarching strictures of honour as she is by the bad hand Nature has dealt her.

She vainly explores folklore and mysticism in the hope of a miracle.

She could perhaps find the solution with another man, but inside her restless soul is a woman who wants to be a good wife.

Surrounded by fertility – the young women who pop babies like peas, the abundance of the fields her husband so laboriously tends, and even the weeds springing up between stones – she finds herself trapped in a world that talks in euphemisms.

Frank discussion of real human pain is both forbidden and weak.

This is an outstanding production, and a real tribute to the technicians and director that so much atmosphere is created with no set save a giant lamp representing the moon.

Yerma is fatalistically driven to desperate measures, and as it reaches its climax the play rises above one woman’s obsession and depression to express the agony of all unfulfilled human dreams.

All credit to Jonah Russell for making the difficult role of the husband, Juan, ultimately sympathetic.

To Mar 26.