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by Des Walsh, directed by Richard Rose

RCA Theatre Company, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

November 11-December 13, 2009

It may have seemed to be a good idea to transfer the action of Federico García Lorca’s tragedy Yerma from an isolated Spanish village in the 1930s to an isolated Newfoundland outport in the 1960s, but the point of Lorca’s play and much else has been lost in the process.  Both Lorca’s original and Rocking the Cradle, Des Walsh’s admittedly free adaptation, centre on the painful descent into madness of a woman obsessed with her inability to have children.  In Lorca, Yerma’s obsession functions as a critique of social rigidity reinforced by church and state, whereas Walsh’s Joan seems more a study of individual aberration devoid of wider resonance.

Unlike Lorca, Walsh omits to mention that Joan (Ruth Lawrence) has married according to her parents wishes not her own, the first and key sign of the woman’s overriding desire to conform.  Instead, Walsh begins with a party celebrating the second anniversary of Joan’s marriage to Vince (Darryl Avalon Hopkins) where they seem to be a happy couple.  It dawns on Joan, rather too slowly, that Vince’s technique of early withdrawal in lovemaking is a deliberate birth-control method.  To mention so clearly the technical reason why Joan is childless undoes the imagery of barrenness in the play and shifts Joan’s problem from a desire to conform to an inability to communicate with her husband.  Also undermining the theme of conformity are the numerous traditional songs Walsh has added that seem to celebrate rather than chastise those who breaking social rules.   

Lawrence has a thin voice and narrow range that do not fully capture the poetry of Walsh’s text or make Joan a sympathetic figure.  Hopkins is suitably taciturn as Vince but needs to communicate the roiling subtext underlying his silence.  Of the sever-member cast, only Greg King as Joan’s one possible love-interest, Didi Gillard-Rowlings as her ever-pregnant friend Mary and Jane Dingle as Mary’s mother feel truly at home in the play.  Director Richard Rose has created a stunning production from Graeme S. Thomson’s abstract set and video projections and Thomas Ryder Payne’s vivid soundscape.  The downside of Thomson’s projections is that a scrim remains in place between the actors and audience for all 80 minutes of the play.  It unintentionally symbolizes our detachment, since it forces us to watch the action through a type of screen that shuts us off from the action.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-11-13.

Photo: Didi Gillard-Rowlings and Ruth Lawrence. ©Justin Hall.