Yerma: A tragic exploration of the female experience

How far would you go to save a child? Or the desire of having a child?

Federico García Lorca’s Yerma deals with this moral tragedy as the titular character falls down a rabbit hole of not being able to conceive with her husband, originally published in 1934 and adapted by the National Theatre in 2017 it delivers a contemporary take on the narrative in a world dominated not so much by the nuclear family and religion but rather class and earthly desires imagining Yerma as a journalist in the modern era. 

The play utilises Greek theatre stylisations such as a chorus that breaks the narrative apart into vignettes broken apart by title cards, and Brecht’s epic theatre utilising a clean stage with minimal props allowing the stage in a quasi thrust staging (with the audience on the north and south of the stage).

The lighting utilises harsh shadows and the empty staging allows for the stage to become the mental headspace for the characters, such as when the fluffy pure white carpet is replaced by darkened grass and finally by trodden down dirt as rain envelops the stage as Yerma sinks to her lowest point.

The deeply difficult role of Yerma is played by Billie Piper (of Doctor Who fame) and delivers a masterful performance truly capturing Yerma’s tragedy as a woman weighed down by religion as she calls to attention in the west that mother Mary is the ambition proposed for all women to be pure even in pregnancy that the immaculate conception is what’s to be expected “that’s what happened wasn’t it? I don’t even know what a c*ck is and yet I’m pregnant”.

Society as she faces the ever increasing pressure to have a child, her sister has one and a miscarriage which Yerma writes about in her online blog in an act of sadistic lashing out at all women who can conceive, her ex-partner has one and she had an abortion with him and yet she cannot conceive with her husband.

Yerma is also scarred with the troubles of her relationship with her family. We do not see her father at any point in the piece and her mother is a cold figure who even in her old age is still consumed by her work being visibly uncomfortable to hug Yerma in a scene where she asks why her mother never held her.

And finally her own biology as she screams at her husband: “I can’t, my body won’t allow me”.

And when it all collapses she yells :“You didn’t believe in it, you never wanted a child with me.”

As the play reaches a fever pitch, the surrealist imagery intensifies actors resemble themselves and represent different people, Piper meets in a drug fuelled festival sex-fest as she confronts her past demons and the reality that she cannot have a child, which brings to attention arguably the most revolutionary part of Lorca’s play, that the central tragedy of this play is a woman in a situation that a man (the very much dominant part of the audience and arguably still to this day) cannot understand.

Much like Yerma’s husband, men are pulling at emotions, hormones and experiences that they cannot understand as they have not and will not experience them.  

Yerma falls further and further into a depression for a baby that isn’t real or likely to ever come (a pre-natal depression) and when pushed to its extreme the nuclear family setup collapses under the pressure of biological differences. 

It is not too far to propose that Greek theatre stylisations are a deliberate choice to remind the contemporary audience that although Yerma is now a tragic hero post-feminist movement where women’s issues and voices are finally beginning to be centralised in the discussion of women themselves it is highly likely that in the 30s Yerma would have been seen as a traditional Greek tragedy woman; overexaggerated, crazy and ungrounded (much like Medea who is viewed as the crazy one in traditional interpretations of the narrative in that play). 

And as Piper lays down broken, divorced, alone, no job, no home, no friends she makes a last-ditch effort to find the peace she has been desiring.

Stabbing herself in the chest. Small murmurs of “I’m coming to join you now I suppose…. My son…. My daughter” in a change to the original narrative where she strangles her husband evokes a much more visceral and tragic ending to Yerma’s story. 

I left Yerma sitting in my chair for nearing on half an hour with my heart weighing heavy for Yerma in the concept that another performance of this play means that she must go through this again, as ‘au pays du cocaine’ by geese and ‘sienna’ by the Marias played to keep me in the headspace I was in I reflected on my experience as a man in a world that is catered to my every need and built for my succeeding to truly grasp a piece of the female experience and the pressure that I will never understand or comprehend, which leads figures like Medea, Yerma and all the women in the crucible to have been viewed as villains rather than realistic depictions of women pushed to their brinks breaking the theatrical norm which only allows men that grace.