1 September 2008 Written by Stephe Harrop Print This Post  Email This Post

Lorca Dreams is a strange and playfully morbid fantasia on the life and works of Federico García Lorca. Performed in Spanish with English surtitles, the piece weaves together extracts from the poet’s works, devised scenes inspired by his biography, and passages exploring the way that Lorca’s ghost haunts and inspires the lives and loves of others.

A young poet leaves his home, and wanders miraculously unscathed through a world of chaos and trauma. He shares an eccentric romance with his friend in an imagined desert, and then, abruptly, vanishes. Other pairs of lovers meet, and dream, and dance, but their idylls collapse as easily as their impassioned word-games. The dead, and those who have insufficiently lived, haunt the margins of the piece, unexpectantly pleading for second chances. Lovers are not apples, a girl confides, they’re infinitely more piquant and complicated. But in the shifting symbolic landscape of Sueño Lorca, both lovers and apples are sensory pleasures to be savoured.

The effect of all this is oddly dreamlike. Nothing that happens seems to be the logical consequence of anything that happened before, and the show’s meandering structure and pace deny any conventional sense of dramatic climax. At times, the cast of five seem like children, playing at telling stories that inevitably tend towards death, although none of them believes that death can be real. The corpse always pops out of its box, ready to play again, but the show’s pervasive melancholia belies the vulnerable brightness of the players’ smiles.

If a basket of spilled apples is just a basket of spilled apples, then Lorca Dreams probably isn’t for you. If, on the other hand, they can sometimes be a fragrant cascade of unfulfilled dreams and half-told stories – then it just might be. Its fragments of narrative and unexplained symbols are intensely, sometimes frustratingly, enigmatic, but Lorca Dreams carries its abundance of potential meaning with deceptive and graceful simplicity.

Lorca Dreams is at the Arcola until September 6: www.arcolatheatre.com