OFS Studio

Tuesday 2nd – Saturday 6th March; 7.30pm & 2.30pm (on Saturday)

“The emotional intensity of the plot is carried well by the actors, who navigate the potentially awkward bits of the story with grace and the passionate scenes with a naiveté that does not feel like they are trying too hard.” Jessica Fast ★★★★★

“a veritable canvas of Andalusian life is painted in front of the audience’s eyes for which much credit is due to all the actors’ attention to detail in speech and mannerisms.” Lukas May ★★★★★

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Blood Wedding ★★★★★

Review by Jessica Fast

Blood Wedding is a musically sumptuous and artistically striking drama, translated from the Spanish and presented at the OFS Studio Theater. It tells the story of the engagement and disastrous wedding of a Groom and a Bride, whose decisions and intertwined family past, involving the Bride’s former fiancé, now married to her cousin, and his family being the murderers of the Groom’s father and brother, complicate their chance of a normal happiness beyond salvation. This leaves the characters, of whom only one has a real name and not just a vague distinction of status, destined to destroy each other due to their selfishness, vengeance, and sorrow. The emotional intensity of the plot is carried well by the actors, who navigate the potentially awkward bits of the story with grace and the passionate scenes with a naiveté that does not feel like they are trying too hard.

The second section of the play is of a more abstract nature than the first, with the personification of the Moon in literally glowing costume and the mysterious woman and woodcutters as the harbingers of death. However, this abstract bordered on too forced and ambiguous at times, especially in contrast to the extremely literal rendering of the main plot. These two views of the story then seem out of joint with each other, since the play concludes with the literal tone, making the abstract seem valiant, but unnecessary. Actors playing more than one character with minimal effort to distinguish one from the other also contributes to this impression of internal instability.

Although I felt like I was missing something by experiencing a translation instead of the original language, this is, unfortunately, unavoidable, and the songs and small phrases sprinkled throughout which are in Spanish helped to keep me grounded in the original form of the play. The songs and music were written specifically for the production, and this also adds texture, melancholy, and cohesiveness, even though the musicians could have been utilized more on the whole. The ethereal harmonizing of the actresses throughout the play, often in Spanish, does more than anything else to remind of the cultural and geographic setting of the story’s origin.

Overall, Blood Wedding is an intense, sensual rendering of a family drama that spans the range of emotion, from joy at an impending wedding, to the sorrows of loved ones lost, to the anger at love seemingly betrayed. Despite some loose connections of dramatic techniques and poorly fitting transitions, this production is successful at portraying feeling in all its manifestations, with a well-delivered musical score to accompany and embellish it.

Blood Wedding

Review by Lukas May

Although a translation from Federico García Lorca’s original play, Blood Wedding nonetheless convincingly invokes its setting in rural Spain using simple but effective props and costume and aided by an original score (composed by Genevieve Dawson) performed proficiently on guitars, cello and violin. Used initially and at other times to reinforce the semblance of the agrarian Spanish community which the play follows, it was also deployed to provide backing to the songs that featured, sung in both Spanish and English. The first song, a lullaby, is haunting rather than comforting and hints darkly at future tragic turns of events. With this and other suggestions (not least that from the title) it is made clear early on to the audience that the upcoming marriage between Groom (Tom Garton) and Bride (Chloe Wicks) will be anything but a fairytale wedding. The direction it will take is elucidated further with the introduction of the brooding and unpleasant Leonardo (Alex Khosla) from the Bride’s past and evidently unhappy with his own marriage – he also happens to belong to a family historically engaged in a blood feud with the Groom’s, as is recounted bitterly by his Mother (Sophie Satchell-Baeza).

With an apparently predictable plot, it may seem surprising how gripping the performance really was. This is partly because one of the outstanding features of Blood Wedding is the characterisation; a veritable canvas of Andalusian life is painted in front of the audience’s eyes for which much credit is due to all the actors’ attention to detail in speech and mannerisms. We pay witness to the painful relationship between gloomy, regretful Leonardo and his downtrodden, unhappy Wife (Jessie O’Regan); eavesdrop on gossiping Neighbour (Cassie Barraclough); laugh at the eager Bride’s Father (Rhys Bevan) attempting to ingratiate himself with the stubborn Mother of Groom. Much of the intensity of the play is captured in the expression and interaction of these personalities and thus we do not need twists or surprises to stay immersed into the storyline. Special praise must be paid to Sophia whose portrayal of the Mother was a daunting prospect since it required her to convey deep personal tragedy but also to offer comic relief – a challenge which she proved equal to since the Mother was funny but this never undermined our sense of her profound grief.

Another particularly impressive aspect of the piece was the lyrical beauty in much of Lorca’s script. Interestingly, this was more noticeable in dialogue rather than the songs – the bizarre and cleverly executed performance by the Moon (Phoebe Eclair-Powell) was particularly rich in poetic symbolism. There weren’t any significant downsides to the performance but two minor shortcomings are identified here. First, the desperate attempts to achieve forgiveness by the Bride in the final scene felt strange and unsatisfying since the immediate regret of her actions lead the spectator to wonder why she made the choices she did in the first place. Secondly, some of the singing was not on a par with the quality of acting or backing music. Overall however, Blood Wedding is a polished and powerful performance, an ambitious venture for all involved but one which did not disappoint.