Barney Norris borrows Lorca’s title and the plot outline of the Spanish poets classic, but this is not a direct adaptation but very much his own play. He sets it at the back of the village hall in Edington in Wiltshire. Young couple Georgie and Rob, who are getting married in three weeks time, have come with Rob’s mum Helen to see if it will do for their wedding reception.
Helen is clearly concerned that her son is so eager to get married so soon. Georgie is four years older than him, and Helen knows things about her that he doesn’t. She was involved with an Irish traveller called Lee, but family saw him as undesirable. That was the end of it, but Lee is still around, married to Georgie’s schoolmate Danni, dad to a baby boy and with another on the way.
Lorca starts his tragedy with the innocent but ominous use of a knife, but contemporary Wiltshire isn’t the setting for family vendettas. While they are waiting for caretaker Brian to turn up, Rob recounts a moonlit vision that is a reminder of the moon’s role in Lorca’s play and could be a portent, but you don’t need to know the Spanish tale—better to forget it and concentrate on this one!
Danni turns up bringing lunch for Lee, who is repairing the hall’s roof and, despite his mother’s efforts to dissuade, him Rob invites them both to the wedding reception (which follows after the interval).
Lee has been a bit of a loser. He lost out with Georgie, isn’t happily married, and we see him on the roof hoping to see sunrise after climbing a hill too late to catch sunset, but his story with Georgie isn’t finished.
Christopher Neenan, making his professional debut, is a somewhat naïve Rob, endearingly innocent and enthusiastic about everything, embarrassed by the way people offer to help him, eager to get free from Helen’s apron strings, while Alex Dunmore presents a mum desperately trying to steer things without being interfering.
Nell Williams gives Georgie a nervous edge; she wants escape and to settle down with a boy she can handle, but Lee is suddenly there again. Lee has seen more life than Rob; Kiefer Moriarty presents both his disappointment with it so far and a romantic streak. Maybe it is that which so attracts Georgie, for he doesn’t take the easy route of emphasising sexiness; we are more aware of that in his relationship with Esme Lonsdale’s Danni.
Caretaker Brain at first seems an incompetent, shambling old fellow, but Norris gives him the equivalent of Lorca’s metaphysical moon scene and David Fielder gives him depth and a fine performance, especially as he recounts his own losses since the army took over the village he was born in to make it a target for gunnery practice.
Tricia Thorns’s production interrupts a staging presenting the minutiae of ordinary life with dramatic theatricality in a way that somehow combines them, the banalities of Alex Marker’s setting suddenly transformed under Neill Brinkworth’s lighting, but this is a drama that feels natively English.