Billie Piper is delivering a monumental performance in the Young Vic production of Yerma, imported from London to the Park Avenue Armory for a mere four weeks. Australian Director Simon Stone’s modernized adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s 1934 classic transplants the action from rural, religious Spain to the swinging and blogging London of today. This serves to make the play far more relevant to modern audiences, for sure, and allows a production filled with vibrantly startling images. The social pressures and character developments which justify Lorca’s plot, though, are somewhat lost in the translation. Not from one language to another, but from pre-Civil War Spain to suburban Brexitland.
Most fortunately, Piper’s blistering performance serves to blot out the question of what this character does and why she does it. “Yerma” means barren; in Stone’s version—still titled Yerma—she goes nameless, referred to in the program simply as “Her” (although at one point they call her “sugarnipples,” presumably not a direct translation from Lorca).
Piper is a marvel to watch, loping through the unconventional playing area like an uncertain colt prancing free through the pasture. Which is to say, if you watch closely you might notice her left foot on several occasions literally pawing the ground in restlessness, questioning and/or testing restraints. Odd, you might say, that your attention should be focused on the actress’s foot; but the fact is, you will be riveted to Piper throughout the 100-minute playing time.
Piper, a stage-screen-telly actress who won last season’s Best Actress Olivier for this performance, is astonishing. She ranges from an intelligent if saucy sophisticate to a paganish primitive over the course of the evening, until there is nothing left for her (and for “Her”) to hold on to. This is a grand performance, no question, and likely to remain unforgettable. Her five stagemates offer able support, especially when Stone allows them brief scenes in the spotlight: notably Brendan Cowell as the husband, in the final stretches of the marriage; and Maureen Beattie as the mother, in what could be termed the “hold me, Momma” scene.
Stone and his team have devised a grand setting for the affair. The vast Armory space is configured with two sets of 17-row bleachers, divided by a Plexiglas-like box which serves as the playing area. And you thought that Richard Jones’ revolving staging of the Armory’s recent Hairy Ape was provocative! Everything here happens in that long rectangular box, with the clear stage walls simultaneously allowing reflections of the audience on your side of the bleachers as well as a view of the folks opposite. (Through the opening night performance, I had an intermittent view of B. Brantley of the Times, six rows up on the other side.)
Lizzie Clachan’s scenery performs remarkable instant transitions—the changes obscured by captions on video screens above the box stage—with new scenery magically appearing in what seems to be a closed box. This is at all times abetted by the lighting of James Farncombe, with Stefan Gregory’s music and sound bathing the play in what sound like liturgical chants until growing increasingly slashing as “Her” goes out of control. And if you wonder whether the Plexiglas walls get progressively marred by finger and body prints, liquor splashes, blood—well, exactly.
If the character-name Yerma is impractical for Stone to retain for his heroine, a London writer with a widely-read self-help blog, so are the combination of social and religious pressures that drive Yerma to an act of violent desperation. Her problem, for those unfamiliar with the original, is that she is unable to bear children. This makes Yerma an outcast in a community of religious peasants, driving her more and more towards inexplicable tragedy. In Stone’s version, it drives her to twelve courses of IVF treatment (resulting, in this telling, in financial bankruptcy). “Her” has science and scientific understanding at her fingertips and on her keyboard; the peasant Yerma was stuck with religion and superstition. Which does alter plot and character motivation.
In the most prominent appearance of Yerma hereabouts—at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, in 1966—the play retained the time and locale in a numbing production which helped propel the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater Company to quick extinction. Stone’s version is unquestioningly a grand improvement: I defy anyone to fall asleep while Billie Piper is on stage, and she’s on stage for almost the whole running time.
But whither Lorca? His course of action leads Yerma—overwrought by years of ostracism as a childless wife—to violently murder her ineffectual husband in the final scene. (While 1965 was a quick failure, it might have been interesting to see young Mr. Langella, in his Broadway debut, clawed to death.) Here, hubby John jets off to a new life in New York. Given the choice, wouldn’t you find that preferable? But it can be seen that this kind of alters Lorca’s point.
Even so, Piper is an absolute marvel.
Yerma opened March 28, 2018, at the Park Avenue Armory and runs through April 21. Tickets and information: armoryonpark.org
