Lorca comes alive in the heat

Sumptuous visuals, tense sonics and Iberian heat courtesy of "the British weather" provide the perfect sweaty, oppressive atmosphere for this solid revival of the play that launched Federico Garcia Lorca's dramatic career.

Telling the true story of Mariana Pineda, a Granadan widow who supported the liberal cause and was executed, it spoke to a Spain labouring under dictatorship in 1927. Eerily, it also foreshadowed the playwright's own murder a decade later, in Granada, at the onset of the Civil War.

Yet despite political undertones, it's always his lyricism that marks out Lorca, and provides most difficulty for productions in translation. Here, as ever, you get the odd banal simile which must sound great in Spanish, and a song for freedom-gets a pretty cursory rendition.

But whatever poetry has been lost in the language, the sets offer some compensation. John Bausor's simple stone-floored room, visible in hot light behind translucent walls of decorated gauze, makes Mariana's house a claustrophobic but unsecretive refuge. You can feel the gaze of spies upon it. Meanwhile, the live guitarist's plucking keeps the air as tight as his top string.

The performances don't quite live up to the backdrop. Pandora Colin plays Mariana as a quiet, pragmatic mother. Her good sense is plain by contrast as she counsels Ben Nathan's Don Pedro, the windy, foolhardy freedom fighter she will die for.

But such reservation makes an unsuitable platform for her later tragic outpourings and she goes to a rather passionless death. Patrick Lynch's establishment rottweiler Pedrosa, who offers Mariana her life in exchange for the usual favours, has an interesting little-Hitler quality, but you cannot believe him to be the ruthlessly savage man of order who has the lesser characters cowering in fear. Still, the story gets told. And you do feel as if you're there.

Viva Lorca: Mariana Pineda