Blood Wedding: A Play »

Frederico Garcia Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, near Granada, in 1898. He established himself as the most popular Spanish playwright of his day. His plays include The Butterfly's Evil Spell (1920), Mariana Pineda (1927), The Shoemaker's Wonderful Wife (1930), Blood Wedding (1933), The Love of Don Perlimpin (1933), Yerma (1934), When Five Years Pass (1936) and The House of Bernada Alba (1936). Better known for his poetry, his books of poems include Books of Poems (1921), First Songs (1927), Songs (1927), Gypsy Ballads (1928) and Poem of Deep Song (1931).

Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote more than forty books of poetry, prose, and translation, including his version of the Oresteia of Aeschylus and the Alcestis of Euripides. He served as Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, and in the year before his death he was awarded the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize (for Tales from Ovid) and the Forward Prize (for Birthday Letters), and received an Order of Merit.

Lorca's Blood Wedding is a classic of twentieth-century theatre. The story is based on a newspaper fragment which told of a family vendetta and a bride who ran away with the son of the enemy family. Lorca uses it to investigate the subjects which fascinated him: desire, repression, ritual, and the constraints and commitments of the rural Spanish community in which the play is rooted. Ted Hughes's version stays close in spirit and letter to the original Spanish. With marvellous directness, he fuses Lorca's vision to his own, and the result is a powerful poetic text which captures all the violence and pathos of the play for an English-speaking audience.