An anaemic affair

An act of blatant theatrical vandalism has been committed. An innocent film star, Gael García Bernal, was caught in the process, while playing Leonardo, who runs off with another man's bride.

The ringleaders, director Rufus Norris and writer Tanya Ronder, had violently set upon Blood Wedding, García Lorca's great 1930s drama of family feuding, adulterous desire and death in rural Spain and forced it into a 21st-century limbo where they subjected it to a savage assault, leaving a half-ruined hulk.

Miss Ronder had stripped away some of the play's symbolic framework and allusions, lowered act three's high poetic plane and everywhere suppressed Lorca's poetic diction.

The Spanish characters were frequently forced to speak as if they had just left a British soap opera.

"There you go" or "It's all happening out there" they would say. The crucial atmosphere of dark foreboding and deathly premonition was drained away. For example, a second-scene lullaby, with its sinister image of the destroyed, drowning horse was baldly cut down to the bathetic doggerel: "Horsey, horsey will not drink."

Rufus Norris, whose stylised production of Festen showed such fidelity to the celluloid original, imparts a neutered artiness to Blood Wedding. He sabotages the play's ritual tone and grave formality by interpolating the character of Death, played by a blacksuited Daniel Cerqueira as a whistling, camp and flippant master of ceremonies.

Norris dispenses with Lorca's Hispanic scene setting, Spanish characters and sense of a closed rural community. His actors - ranging from Rosaleen Linehan in inappropriate, low-key form as the bereaved, fearful mother to Thekla Reuten's fine, anguished bride and Paul Bhattacharjee as her ridiculously bawling father - boast accents as various as those at the United Nations. Katrina Lindsay's blankish, almost bare stage set evokes scant atmosphere: silhouetted figures against a white panel suggest the wedding party celebrations.

Lorca's amazing third act in the dark forest, with the Beggarwoman who represents death as a bird stretching its immense wings, is banished. The almost nude Assly Zandry plays the almost nude figure of The Moon. García Bernal's smouldering Leonardo flashes charismatic eyes.

Yet relying on an uninflected, rushed style of speech, Bernal hardly seems impelled by Eros. Up against his love-rival, Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson's tall, hunkily imposing Groom, Bernal looms unfairly small as a homme fatale.

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Blood Wedding