Yerma

by Simon Stone after Federico Garcia Lorca

seen by live streaming from the Young Vic on 31 August 2017

Simon Stone directs his own radical re-working of Lorca's play, with Billie Piper as 'Her', Brendan Cowell as her partner John, Maureen Beattie as her mother Helen, Charlotte Randle as her sister Mary, John Macmillan as her ex-boyfriend Victor and Thalissa Teixeira as her friend Des.

The original play, written in 1934, is set in rural Spain where Yerma, a farmer's wife, is unable to bear a child in a society where childbearing is central to a woman's identity and value. It is quite a jump - but in the event largely a successful one - for Simon Stone to have reset this predicament in contemporary London (with some up-to-the-minute references to current politics), where it might be imagined that the issue of childbearing is less fraught by crippling social mores. Billie Piper's character, no longer given a name, is bubbly, self-assured, flirtatious with her indulgent partner, either unaware of or unfazed by his self-absorbed approach to intimate relationships. Only as they celebrate moving into a new (large) home in an up-and-coming but still affordable part of London, and she announces that they should think of having a child, are there hints that the two might have awkwardly different views about the prospect.

Village life is replaced by the presence of a difficult mother (who apparently hated being pregnant and who seems oblivious of the effect her pronouncements might have on a daughter finding it difficult to conceive) and a fecund sister; but there is a wider unseen community of blog-readers eager to lap up the postings made over a period of several years as the project becomes an overwhelming obsession. The feeling of entrapment and constriction is admirably conveyed by the set designed by Lizzie Clachan, a long rectangle surrounded by glass walls, in which occasional items of furniture appear and disappear, and which becomes a garden (fruitful then sterile) and a muddy festival field later in the proceedings. Scenes are punctuated by blackouts in which the passage of time is signalled by text ('TWO YEARS LATER', and so forth) and plot pointers (for example, 'SHE MAKES A PROMISE') and the sets are changed as required in what (in the cinema at any rate) looks like an impossible sleight of hand.

The cast is excellent, each character in many ways self-absorbed and heedless of the consequences unless forced to face them in extremity - a self-centred partner, a cold mother, a distant sister, a regretful former boyfriend, an excitable younger friend - and yet believably contributing to the escalating sense of panic and disaster. Brendan Cowell in particular has the difficult task of portraying an initially hedonistic man drawn into his partner's quest, perhaps unwillingly co-operating at first, but finally driven to exasperation by its failure and the crippling cost (financial as well as emotional) which destroys his dreams. They may have been callow dreams built on presumptuous reliance on masculine power, but void he faces at the end is no less real for that.

The final words and the most praise must go to Billie Piper for her astonishing and wrenching portrayal of a woman driven from security to ruin by the betrayal of her dreams and desires. She is a complex figure, not entirely likable - though she wants  baby she several times expresses a dislike of children; she does not hesitate to publish her innermost thoughts on her blog regardless of the pain she might cause others (a trait inherited perhaps from her tactless mother) - and yet we follow the twists and turns of her development in appalled fascination, from the artless pleasure at the beginning which could easily belong in a light social comedy, to the abject despair of her final moments as virtually nothing is left of her except her frustrated obsession. It's a performance of extraordinary rawness give with a breathtaking technical virtuosity. Since it was impossible to get tickets for this revival of last year's production, witnessing it in a live streaming was the next-best option.