The Young Vic is well known for its radical approach to the classics. Australian director Simon Stone’s truly remarkable reworking of Yerma is so radical that nothing is left but the title and the terrible agonies of not being able to have a child. Since yerma is Spanish for barren, Stone could have called his play Barren.
The rural drama is taken out of early 20th-century Catholic Spain and relocated in a modern, urban world. The heroine is now a professional journalist who longs to be pregnant, and writes about her failure to become so in a frank and hurtful blog, which humiliates her partner and family.
