The Young Vic is well-known for its radical approach to the classics. Australian director Simon Stone’s truly remarkable re-working of Lorca’s Yerma is so radical that nothing is left but the title and the terrible agonies of not being able to have a child. Since Yerma is Spanish for barren, Stone could have called his play, Barren
The rural drama is taken out of early 20th century Catholic Spain and relocated in a modern urban world. The heroine is now a professional journalist, who longs to be pregnant and writes about her failure to become so in a frank and hurtful blog, which humiliates her partner and family.
The audience sits either side of a traverse stage and the actors perform inside a glass cage. Stone did the same thing in his arresting re-working of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck at the Barbican a couple of years ago. The script is a series of short scenes punctuated by black-outs and chanting. The scene changes are remarkable for their swiftness.
The immensely likeable Billie Piper gives an extraordinary emotional performance which moves skilfully from joy and laughter to disillusion, depression, obsession and self-destruction. Brendan Cowell is excellent, too, as her unhappy partner who ends up spiritually and financially bankrupt. IVF treatment does not come cheap. The production builds to a shattering climax.