It is a dull May early afternoon: yet again, the sun has abruptly abandoned Dublin. Inside a small room two women are reeling from the heat of a typical Spanish morning. The concerned maid has noticed that the young girl she is helping to prepare for her wedding is tense not with excitement but with something darker. Fiona McElroy, as the Bride and Sinead Roberts, as the maid, under the astute direction of Leticia Agudo are rehearsing one of the central scenes from Federico Garcia Lorca's classic Blood Wedding. The production of this play, with its echoes of Synge, is part of the new theatre company Common Currency's forthcoming Dublin Lorca Festival which opens on June 22nd and runs until July 18th. Friday marks the centenary of the birth of the poet dramatist who was murdered by Franco's soldiers on a dusty roadside in August 1936, during the opening weeks of the Spanish Civil War. His was a short life and the irony of it is that the cruel death which made him the symbol of Spain's martyrdom has tended to overshadow his work as well as the multiple complexities of his quicksilver personality. To appreciate Lorca the artist it is important to consider the comfortable, liberal background he came from which so shaped his sensibilities - and sensitivities. Also crucial is his homosexuality which was to make him socially and eventually politically vulnerable in the macho society of his Spain.
Few male writers have explored the female psyche as carefully - or as accurately. His insights were of course influenced by the harsh realities of the society he belonged to, a society he brilliantly exposes in The House Of Bernarda Alba in which the mother figure Medea-like sacrifices her child in the name of respectability. In Blood Wedding the angry, frustrated Bride realises her error in rejecting Leonardo, her first, true love - because he had nothing to give her at the time. Now a few years on, married with a child and another on the way, Leonardo reappears just as she has agreed to marry. As she reluctantly prepares for a wedding she has no interest in, a part of her has already decided to forsake respectability and her future to run away with this married man.
Wild passion and social survival are the tensions at the heart of this play. Inspired by a news story Lorca had read, the achievement of the play is the characterisation of the Bride and her ambivalent attitude towards Leonardo. Lorca's response to life was also torn between his lively, sociable personality as the privileged son of kindly parents who indulged him and his outsider self-image, which nurtured his victim complex. A natural performer and showman who loved performing his work, he was also obsessed with death, particularly his own. In Fable Of Three Friends To Be Sung In Rounds, written in New York in 1929, the prophetic lines "I knew they had murdered me/ They searched cafes, cemeteries, churches/They opened barrels and cupboards/And plundered three skeletons for their gold teeth/But they couldn't find me anywhere/They couldn't?/No they couldn't find me." Lorca's body never was found. Before marrying Lorca's mother, his father had been widowed. There were no children from that 14-year marriage. But Lorca never forgot "the woman who might have been my mother". When his landowner father remarried love, not social ambition, dictated his choice of bride and, now wealthy from the sugar beet boom, he married a school teacher. Federico was the eldest of five, a younger brother subsequently died. The image of a dead child haunts his work as does the theme of childlessness. Lorca's homosexuality denied him children while the dilemma of the heroine in Yerma also draws on this. Born in 1898 Lorca, unlike so many of his generation of European artists and writers, did not go to war. Even had Spain been involved, his slight limp would have excused him.
Displaying little interest in conventional education, the young Lorca quickly impressed however with his musical and artistic gifts. Given a toy puppet theatre, he quickly became fascinated with linking performance with story and music. In common with that of his great contemporary, Brecht, Lorca's theatre enlisted poetry and song.
Committed to the Republic and determined to help bring theatre to the citizens of rural Spain - which he did through his involvement with a student touring theatre group - Lorca was not political, "I'll never be political. I'm a revolutionary, because all true poets are revolutionary . . . but political, never!" Few writers can claim the extraordinary linguistic gearshifts which dazzle throughout his daring, powerful, passionate work. Lover of nature and of life, Lorca, one of the most original artistic sensibilities of this century, defies gender, politics, social repression by co-ordinating high art with individual preoccupations, social comment and the complex richness of Spain's traditional culture which celebrates nature, life, love and death.