Lorca Plays: 1: Blood Wedding; Yerma; Dona Rosita the Spinster (World Classics) (Vol 1)

Blood wedding, Doña Rosita the spinster / translated by Gwynne Edwards -- Yerma / translated by Peter Luke.

These three tragedies were written at the height if Lorca's powers and display his innovative mix of Spanish popular tradition and modern dramatic technique. Blood Wedding tells the story of a couple drawn irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage; Doña Rosita the Spinster follows the appalling fate of a young woman beguiled into the expectation of marriage and left stranded for a lifetime whilst Yerma is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility. Set in and around his home territory, Granada, the plays return again and again to the lives of passionate individuals, particularly women, trapped by the social conventions of narrow peasant communities. The plays appear here in new playable translations.

In his four last plays (Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba, Dona Rosita the Spinster) Federico García Lorca offered his disturbed and disturbing personal vision to Spanish audiences of the 1930s---unready, as he thought them, for the sexual frankness and surreal expression of his more experimental work. The authentic sense of danger of Lorca's theatre is finely conveyed here in John Edmunds's fluent and rhythmic new translations that lend themselves admirably to performance. Written at the height of Lorca's theatrical powers, these three tradgedies display his innovative mix of Spanish popular tradition and modern dramtic technique. They focus on the lives of passionate individuals, particularly women, trapped by the social conventions of peasant communitie