Ferderico Garcia Lorca 's Yerma by Kusum Haider

• Audio Interview of Salma Haider :

1. About the Play 'Yerma'
2. About Herself

• Event Details : The Spanish Embassy, Delhi presents Ferderico Garcia Lorca 's Yerma.
• Despite the considerable time Lorca devoted to drama, he was primarily regarded a poet. The reason seems to be that Lorca himself had never any doubt as to his favorite mode of expression — it was poetry, possibly with music coming to a close second and after that drama. In his earlier shorter plays and much more so in the later longer plays, Lorca displays his obvious mastery over the dramatic technique, vivid sense of characterization, subtle and trenchant, conveying his criticism of Spanish society, without his characters being mere mouthpieces. His plays are never static; they have great sweep and force. His plots are tightly knit, his dialogue muscular and staccato with great poetic intensity.

• Inspite of the mysterious circumstances attending his death, Lorca was not political. To go by his writings only, Lorca was a revolutionary in the best sense of the term. Being liberal, his sympathies were obviously with the peasantry and Spain in the thirties, was an agricultural society.
• Lorca was deeply conscious of human dignity, evident in the characters from his plays. Yerma at her neurotic worst is a person with principles prepared to stand by them. This dignity, strength and even stubbornness requires some reconciliation with Lorca’s fascination with death. He neither accepts defeat nor resists the conflict of values that Yerma has to face.
• The three rural tragedies — Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934) and The House of Bernada Alba (1936) are regarded as Lorca’s major works. The theme of each is sophisticatedly simple. Yerma is the story of a peasant woman, who desperately wants a child but is not prepared to leave her husband. She stands firm holding on to her principles and deep sense of honour. The theme is innocence, and the germs of destruction in innocence.
• In Yerma, Lorca turns to yet another haunting theme which is present in all his lyric and dramatic work—that of a frustrated instinct for motherhood. This theme he embodied in the character Yerma, which is the most dramatic and the most poetic.
• - Kusum Haider ( Director )