Martyr Mariana is close to death

You can rely on that astonishing Spanish playwright, Garcia Lorca. He created a theatrical gallery of sexually frustrated 20th century women, whose hopes of love are extinguished in a Spain where the Catholic Church puts a straitjacket on the soul.

But Mariana Pineda was not one of his fictitious creations. She lived in the 19th century and became a national heroine on whom Lorca based one of his least known plays. It's here revived by Kate Wild, in a painfully shrill and melodramatic production. The play's small but interesting potential is not exploited. And Gwynne Edwards's stilted, clumsy translation - the text cut to confusion point - keeps stumbling over Lorca's stretches of affected poeticising.

Yet the play suitably launches the Gate's interesting Politick Death season, which deals with attitudes to dying in plays spanning six centuries. Mariana Pineda, while taking an actual historical event as its stimulus, broods about dying for one's ideals - for love of them and for a lover. In the playwright's romantically transforming hands, Mariana is an opponent of the tyrannical Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, and lover of one of the fighters for liberty.

She goes stoically to her death for refusing to name her fellow conspirators against the regime, and acquires a special pathos in Lorca's reworking of the legend, when she ends up deserted by her man.

Mariana Pineda does not, however, deal much with confrontation. There's something inexorable about Mariana's decline. Kate Fleetwood's slim, hispanic-looking heroine takes to suffering like a cat to a dish of creamed chicken. How she basks and revels in emotion, putting on a voice big enough to frighten the horses and with artificial manner to match. Her gestures are best suited to a gymnasium. When the king's smitten, sadistic representative (John Kirk) appears, she has already gone over the top - and how. The declamatory, overpitched style is pervasive, though Philip Ralph, as Mariana's lover and chief conspirator, looks more a troubled curate than freedom-fighter.

Lorca describes the play as a popular ballad in "three engravings" rather than acts. This is an allusion to his vivid, pictorial scene-setting, for which Naomi Dawson's white, bare design never serves. The play's pervasive moods of menace, threat and grief, with popular ballads and dream-like poetic sequences, are rarely captured. But the finale, when Mariana walks serenely to death - light blazing, church bells ringing, nuns watching - is curiously beautiful.

Mariana Pineda