Writer: Federico García Lorca
Director: Paula Paz
Two Don Perlimplíns and two Belisas contend with desire, the romantic imagination and the reality of love in Paula Paz’s intriguing production of Federico García Lorca’s The Love of Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden, a mini-morality tale that stretches across time, one version set in the nineteenth-century, the other in our contemporary world. Playing at the Cervantes Theatre in both Spanish and English and running for an unbroken 75 minutes, Paz’s approach finds an intriguing universality in the characters’ suffering.
The elderly Don Perlimplín is persuaded by his servant to marry the beautiful Belisa, the much younger daughter of his neighbour whom he spies on. Quickly wed, Perlimplín’s happiness is complete but discovers his wife’s possible adultery almost immediately. Encouraging her love for another, he permits a letter from the man she truly desires, and they arrange a late-night rendezvous in Perlimplín’s garden.
In 2018, Josie Rourke directed a superb double version of Measure for Measure, swapping time periods and gender roles at the interval to more closely investigate the sexual politics of the play. Paz takes an almost identical approach to Lorca’s short drama, running the play twice, first in Spanish with surtitles and a second time in English using exactly the same text translated by Caridad Svich. And the concept raises some interesting questions about the poetry of the play in its original language as well as the striking consistency in the foolish things that people still do for love.
Paz makes her two plays subtly different and what begins with similar blocking develops on the denuded stage into quite separate experiences, conversations taking place with changed emphasis or a new location that prevents the show from becoming too obviously repetitive. And the ways in which Paz blends old and new together have meaning. Version Two begins almost immediately, two actors in the audience restarting the drama as the lights fade on the original Don Perlimplín. Likewise, the first Belisa haunts the second play and although this character is reimagined as a young man, the two share lines and interaction with Don Perlimplín who seems to live more deeply in his own fantasy as a result.
But unlike Rourke’s production, The Love of Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden doesn’t have quite the same certainty of purpose, its commentary not moving beyond Lorca’s continual currency and ideas on love and desire. Paz’s production could push harder against the play’s construction to examine the role of gender, age and wealth in the powerplay between the characters while comparative female and male desires could take on a deeper reading across the two plays.
The cast is excellent. Juan Carlos Talavera sets the standard as the original Don Perlimplín, a tragi-comic reading that his equivalent Paul Rider develops into a more emotional, almost delusional reading of the duped spouse. Maggie García’s Belisa is strong and seductive, aching with physical needs she cannot control while Alex Perez is a crueller alternate, crushing his husband’s spirit.
There is a power in hearing Lorca’s original text and the Cervantes Theatre has taken a really interesting approach to reimagining this short play as a multilingual double bill.
Runs until 25 November 2023
The Reviews Hub Score:
Multilingual double bill
