‘The church no longer has the same grip on moral values and lives but is still very much in our bodies and our mindsets’

Yerma. It’s a dry, harsh word for an unforgiving condition. Translated from Spanish, it means barren or uninhabited. In the case of the childless young woman to whom society has attached this label, which is also the title of Federico García Lorca’s haunting rural tragedy, its meaning is unimaginably cruel. She longs to be a mother but is unable to bear a child. As a result she is stigmatised and isolated by her devout, narrow-minded Andalusian community, condemned to a life of endless shame and self-loathing.
Lorca knew what it was to be cast out and marginalised, by the Catholic Church and by his own people, to struggle to conceal his forbidden sexual identity in the face of public and religious opprobrium, and to be assassinated for his pains. Patrick J O’Reilly, who trained at the Jacques Lecoq theatre school in Paris, is an innovative performer, theatremaker and, since 2016, artistic director of Belfast’s Tinderbox Theatre Company. He too has suffered social prejudice and isolation.
His artistic vision and methodology are distinctively European. A year ago he adapted and directed one of the theatrical highlights of 2023, a handsome, high-tech version of Eugène Ionesco’s anti-fascist play Rhino. Before that he had crafted a bold, intensely physical adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s absurdist Ubu Roi. Now he is turning his attention to another European masterpiece in the shape of Lorca’s Yerma.
O’Reilly was born in a mother-and-baby home in Dublin. After a peripatetic early childhood he grew up in the Cooley Peninsula, near Dundalk, in Co Louth. It’s the place he calls home, a place he visits whenever possible, a place whose mountains he climbs once a year. At 43, he now has his own family. Along with his partner, he is the foster parent to a 12-year-old boy and is learning to navigate the joys and pitfalls that come with such responsibility. He concedes that, especially in the context of his current project, his own home situation opens up discussions about what it means to be a family in today’s society.
His challenging early-years experiences drew him towards a radical new adaptation of Lorca’s powerful poetic drama for this year’s Belfast International Arts Festival. He has removed it from the steamy heat of 1930s rural southern Spain and relocated it to the lands of Cooley, which he knows so well. Audiences should expect to see on stage a representation not of woods, farmland and rolling hills, however, but of aridity and sterility. Even more intriguing, given the play’s dark subject matter, is its publicity image: the line “Let the party begin” accompanied by a woman’s screaming face.
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The party references a social gathering O’Reilly attended last year, the Baptism of a friend’s baby. He describes it as “a big Irish family affair, with all the trimmings. There were several generations of relatives, friends and neighbours, plus a multitude of noisy children running around everywhere.”
Stepping back from the celebrations, he was suddenly struck by how a childless woman would feel if she were pitched into this fertile, fecund gathering. The thought of her anguish opened a door in his imagination, enabling him to plot a route into a play that, on first reading, left an indelible mark.
“What immediately attracted me to Lorca was his incredible ability to convey so much passion and desire through his narrative, through his worlds of [the plays] Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba,” O’Reilly says. “His uncanny skill in writing for women, as a gay man, felt so powerful. When he talks about ‘duende’, which means an irresistible human force or a heightened state of emotion, I feel that his writing and his plots are filled with such profound passion. They look deep into our humanity and our relationships. In combining all these elements, he creates a beautiful world of visual imagery though his words.”
Somewhat ruefully, O’Reilly pinpoints the continuing relevance of a play that was written almost a century ago yet relates so strongly to global events and prevailing attitudes in our own time.
“I adore this play. In one respect it tells a simple story: a woman is unable to conceive a child, and her desire and obsession force her to commit murder. On that level it’s already full to the brim with every possible element of pain and suffering and desire. But it also speaks of today. Ireland has just had a referendum on family and a woman’s place in the home. Then we have Trump and Vance commenting on the fact that Kamala Harris doesn’t have children.
“Sadly, we are still very much inside this world, where the patriarchal motives of women having autonomy over their bodies, and the question of what ‘family’ actually means, indicates that those attitudes are still present. This is in spite of the fact that the church no longer has the same grip on moral values and lives but is still very much in our bodies and our mindsets.”
As someone who has worked extensively with European methodologies, O’Reilly identifies in the play an expressionism that encompasses what he calls “my full theatrical stenography. I want to give audiences experiences that feel bigger than just sitting in an auditorium. That’s another reason why Lorca is such a big pull to me. His visual language describes how we are feeling as people, but in a highly poetic and universal form.
“I was drawn to theatre because it takes me out of the mundane and brings me into a wider and richer space where I feel completely connected. It’s our job as directors and theatre artists to pull an audience into the space and make them feel a real sense of presence and unity. I think theatre is probably one of the very few forms that can create that experience. My Le Coq training gave me a perspective about creating theatre that’s very inventive. We are storytellers, but the way in which we tell a story should work on different levels. It should land on people in different ways. Theatre needs to have fire: it should make you sit forward.”
It’s far from the heady, intensely creative atmosphere of one of Europe’s top drama schools that O’Reilly was reared. His early interest in physical theatre was awakened by a weekly Saturday-morning gymnastics class in Dundalk.
“It was from that very physical, acrobatic world that I first became aware of the presence of the body,” he says. “I started getting into theatre when I was about 11 or 12 and became interested in combining theatricality with acrobatics. When I went to Belfast Met” – Belfast Metropolitan College – “in 2000, I was introduced to directors like Grotowski and Artaud and Peter Brook. It was a real penny-drop moment. I thought, Oh yes, this theatre that I’m creating here, and that I’m in love with, is like a 3D, multisensory physical experience. It makes me feel alive.”
Through his involvement with the European Creative Rooftop Network, O’Reilly met the Catalan queer theatre theorist, Lorca specialist and Cambridge University lecturer Isaias Fanlo, with whom he has been collaborating on this adaptation.
The network “organises rooftop festivals across Europe”, he says. “This year I have already performed in Faro, Rotterdam and Marseilles. It’s a gorgeous initiative to be part of and a real privilege to be working with Isaias on capturing the essence of the play.
“Growing up, I had great anger towards the church for two major reasons: being born in a mother-and-baby home and being a gay man. I felt constantly an outsider. The church wouldn’t recognise the fact that I was an ‘illegitimate’ son, and, as a gay teenager, there was so much contempt around anyone who was ‘different’ or didn’t fit in with the religious beliefs of that time.
“Even to the end, Yerma remains defiantly faithful to her husband, and that blows my mind. When she has the strength and resilience to speak up for herself, she is labelled mad or hysterical. The community wants to hush her so that she can’t disrupt the status quo. She is deeply unhappy yet knows nothing else but to hold on to what is, in my opinion, a very outdated tradition of family and what it means to be a woman today.
“In terms of making the work, it’s an exciting, rich place to be, because I disagree with her on so many levels. At the same time I have such empathy with her. The play is set in my home place in the borderlands, where there’s a kind of brutalism in the landscape, an energy in that interface between the North and the South.
“There’s a strong hold and connection to religion but, at the same time, a deep connection to the land and the elemental forces of nature. The cultural mysticism that is so prevalent in Yerma really fits with the border mentality and environment, with that clash between religion versus tradition and the land”.
Yerma, staged by Tinderbox Theatre Company, previews at the Lyric Theatre, as part of Belfast International Arts Festival, on Thursday, October 10th, then runs from Friday, October 11th, to Sunday, November 3rd