`Yerma' with puppets

A three-day workshop in puppeteering last December proved crucial to Galloglass Theatre Company's exciting production of Lorca's classic Yerma, the most Shakespearean of his plays. According to the play's director, Bairbre Ni Chaoimh, this is where four of the five-strong cast - playing 24 characters - were recruited. "Irish theatre is only beginning to incorporate what is a European tradition of using actors and puppets," she says, adding how important this device is to the play as Lorca conceived it. "We wanted to create a sense of the village society by using puppets. It is also to supplement the five main characters."

The production - which opened in Clonmel on Thursday with original music by Trevor Knight, and continues a month-long 15-venue national tour - approaches the play, which was first performed in 1934, at its most earthy. "We've gone for a more raw production which, while incorporating Lorca's poetry, evokes the daily life of rural people. Some of the poems within it are sung and underscored."

Ni Chaoimh, who has just been appointed the first artistic director of the Dublin company Calypso, has always been fascinated by Lorca's power as a playwright and particularly his understanding of women.

"It is a heartbreaking story. Yerma is a conventional Spanish woman who has been conditioned to accept that all a woman can aspire to is having babies. As she has no children of course she begins to feel desperate." Most readings have tended to present Juan, Yerma's husband, as a weak, cold man, probably impotent, who is indifferent to his wife's despair. Juxtaposed with his lack of warmth is the strongly physical Victor. Ni Chaoimh, while appreciating Lorca's point that men have their work, the animals, the trees to sustain them, views Juan somewhat more sympathetically. "I see the play as a journey. Yerma and Juan are a tragic pair, they seem to keep missing each other. At the outset they seem young and happy, but her obsession destroys their relationship. Even at the end you feel there is a chance they will resolve their problems." Instead the action takes its final, dramatic turn.

For Ni Chaoimh - who has begun rehearsal as Mrs Surface for Rough Magic's forthcoming production of The Whisperers (1765), one of only three plays written by novelist Frances Sheridan (1724-66) mother of Brinsley and wife of Tom who ran Dublin's Smock Alley - Lorca was an immediate choice on being approached by Galloglass. "Yerma followed on from that. It is such a wonderful play for women to work on; all of the female characters are strong," and she refers to the pagan common sense of the fertility witch who advises Yerma, to "Look to men, not God".

Yerma is at the City Arts Centre, Dublin on Tuesday and Thursday-Saturday