“Yerma” at the Young Vic
Christine Eccles on the South Bank
5 August 2016
Yerma is not the name of Lorca’s heroine in this version, but this name is still her entire identity. Yerma means ‘barren’ in Spanish, and back in the days when biology was destiny, to be a woman and to be barren was to be a nothing; the sum of your value in society was a big fat zero.
In this re-working of Lorca’s Yerma by the Australian writer-director Simon Stone at the Young Vic theatre, the action is transposed from pre-Civil War rural Spain to sophisticated metropolitan London.
In some ways Stone’s audacious attempts to liberate Lorca’s play from its very concrete specificity and to release it into the realms of an enduring myth is a self defeating exercise with Stone swapping one lot of cultural markers for another. His version is so bang-up-to date it even contains jokes about Brexit and Sadiq Khan. But in placing the heroine in a context in which there is no social pressure whatsoever to have a child, he is able to examine this primal drive just for its own sake.
It is Billie Piper who lifts this dusty curio out of the dramaturgical cabinet and absolutely makes it her – and Everywoman’s – story. From savvy flirtatious hipster, she descends into a hell of her own making, spurned by every man she so desperately tries to pull. Her throaty voice rasps alternately with raw pain and seductive intimacy. Her wide mouth lights up the stage with its generous smile but is also made for animal howling. Hers is a truly felt performance of staggering gut-wrenching authenticity. Piper has a kernel of such sweetness and warmth that you never entirely forget the lovely girl she once was.
Piper plays the anonymous ‘Her’ as a creation of the millennial zeitgeist. She begins her journey through the play as a 32-year-old lifestyle editor of a national newspaper and a compulsive blogger of her own personal life. She and John her Australian boyfriend and, eventually, husband (Brendan Cowell playing a distracted globe-trotting businessman) have just raised a glass of champagne to their newly-bought home when she ever so casually just lets slip that she would now like a baby. Caught on the hop, John warily agrees whereupon they stamp unconvincingly on her packet of contraceptive pills.
Enclosed within designer Lizzie Clachan’s set, which is a large coffin-shaped glass-walled box, Piper then spends the better part of an hour and a half in 20 or more short scenes of an exhausting, almost cinematic intensity. Claustrophobically and obsessively she pursues her goal to become pregnant, excluding all other forms of fulfilment and happiness. She’s thwarted by John’s low libido and strange sexual preferences. She’s frustrated by the fact that despite an unhappy marriage her sister (Charlotte Randall) is disgustingly fertile. She is alienated by her mother’s lack of maternal feelings (Maureen Beattie as cold as ice). She’s no longer amused by her personal assistant’s reckless reliance on the morning-after pill (Thalissa Teixeira as the wingman every girl needs). She bankrupts the pair of them over endless futile cycles of IVF. And above all, she is haunted by an abortion she had with Victor (John MacMillan), her ex, back in her carefree twenties – sex on a bike. Over the five relentless years the play covers, she is driven only by the tick-tock of her biological clock.
Yes, you do query why a liberated woman doesn’t consider surrogacy or adoption: why it has to be all about her eggs in her basket, why she loses all track of who she is. Once again we see a heroine maddened by grief flailing around the stage in skimpy white clothing (most recently, Nina in The Seagull and Nora in The Plough and the Stars). In the original, Yerma turns on her husband and kills him. In this version, there is a twist. ‘Her’ internalizes her despair. Enough’s enough; there’s mercy finally to be found in “no more wondering”.
Stone often cuts off the action in mid sentence. Stunning set changes are effected in blackout to the loud accompaniment of many forms of sacred music and scenes are prefaced by witty captions. For the curtain call, there’s another twist. The lighting, which previously had been used to hide, reveals a travers stage with an audience who have been on the other side all along. But, ultimately, it’s the emotional punch delivered by Piper under Stone’s direction that knocks your breath away. It is simply an experience of a lifetime.
