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Rocking The Cradle. Photo by Justin Hall.

Rocking The Cradle
By Des Walsh, Directed by Richard Rose
At The Reid Theatre in St. John’s until October 18
At the Tarragon Main Space from November 4 to December 13

The play, “freely adapted from” Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1934 Spanish drama Yerma, has a relatively simple narrative: Joan’s (Ruth Lawrence) unfulfilled desire for a child leads to her mental instability and the destruction of her marriage to Vince (Darryl Avalon Hopkins). Walsh transfers the action of Yerma from rural Spain to a Newfoundland outport in the 1960s. The characters speak with recognizably Newfoundland accents (though they are close to what you can hear in contemporary St. John’s) and employ recognizably Newfoundland turns of phrase (conjugating “I know” as “I knows,” punctuating sentences with “biy,” “girl”). They speak of moving to Toronto for work and allude to the historical closing of isolated fishing communities and resettlement in larger towns during the 1950s and 1960s.

The play, “freely adapted from” Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1934 Spanish drama Yerma, has a relatively simple narrative: Joan’s (Ruth Lawrence) unfulfilled desire for a child leads to her mental instability and the destruction of her marriage to Vince (Darryl Avalon Hopkins). Walsh transfers the action of Yerma from rural Spain to a Newfoundland outport in the 1960s. The characters speak with recognizably Newfoundland accents (though they are close to what you can hear in contemporary St. John’s) and employ recognizably Newfoundland turns of phrase (conjugating “I know” as “I knows,” punctuating sentences with “biy,” “girl”). They speak of moving to Toronto for work and allude to the historical closing of isolated fishing communities and resettlement in larger towns during the 1950s and 1960s.

While this setting is not unimportant, Rocking The Cradle is not really documentary theatre. Like Yerma’s olive growers and shepherds, Walsh’s characters are less obviously interested in government policy than they are preoccupied with the constants of their own natural history: the sea that sustains the fishery, the ever-present wind, and the endless alternation of birth and death. The play, too, is cyclical: beginning and ending on successive Christmases, Walsh returns to the celebration of the birth of Christian salvation and hope. By contrast, Joan’s almost feral need for a baby, her desire to experience motherhood, ironically cuts short this cycle; her thwarted “natural” urge to create life descends in a straight line towards death.

As Walsh writes in his program note, “The geomorphology of anywhere is carved out by the people who live there, not by nature alone,” and Joan’s despair at failing to perform her natural function, is shaped in relation to the powerful force of her repressive, restricting community. Lawrence conveys Joan’s deep contempt for the gossip of neighbours Monica (Monica Walsh) and Shirley (Kate Corbett), who taunt Joan for her barrenness and repeat (false) rumours of her infidelity.

If Lawrence partly succeeds in making Joan a moral centre in this world she also complicates the character. She shocks and disgusts her sympathetic and upstanding, though conservative, mother Helen (Jane Dingle) with blunt anticlericalism and graphic expressions of her sexuality. Elsewhere, raging with jealousy, she attacks her pregnant friend Mary (Didi Gillard-Rowlings) before dropping to her knees to beg forgiveness, horrified at her own savage instincts. Lawrence generates an even greater sense of emotional imprisonment with the two men in the play. She is unwilling at first to accept neighbour Tom’s advances, because she believes in her duty to Vince, despite his indifference to producing a child. As friction between husband and wife increases, so does the sexual tension between Joan and Tom, but by the time she is ready to act on their attraction, it is too late: Tom leaves for Toronto, and Joan is locked into her own tragic struggle with Vince.

Director Richard Rose (who has staged Yerma previously) matches the emotional realism that the actors aim at to a thoroughly artificial and theatrical visual presentation. Graeme Thomson’s set depicts a kitchen, the proverbial locale of Newfoundland parties (it opens and closes with parties of sorts), but the home surrounding this room is merely hinted at through minimal details. The house seems turned in on itself, with an upstage wall of clapboard facing inwards. Two planks atop this exterior-interior represent a gently-pitched roof and a window frame defines the stage-left exterior wall.

Rose uses a scrim to project not just snowstorms but images that reflect Joan’s mental state as well: singing to cope with her circumstances, she “drifts away” and begins rowing an imaginary boat atop the kitchen table as a calm sea appears on the scrim; later, this imagined sea proves fatally rough. Characteristically, Rose also has his actors use the set elements in a highly symbolic and transformative fashion. For instance, when Helen searches for Joan, who has wandered distracted into a storm, four actors stand entirely visible to the audience on either side of the stage, holding two lengths of bright white fabric to represent the storm or the fog. When Helen fails to calm Joan, who is standing on the table that has become an outcrop of rock, the performers raise the fabric as they shake it, engulfing the women in a silken “mist.”

Rose applies similar staging techniques to his representation of Joan’s fascination with the birds, in particular the crows. At one point, as she watches the birds, the downstage lights dim (Thomson also designed the production’s fine lighting) and Joan is left in a partially lit kitchen. Two actors appear as silhouettes on the darkened forestage; they hold fishing rods with stuffed crows hanging from the lines and caw while making the birds “fly” rather unrealistically. The overt lack of realism in this shadow-play actually increases its visual appeal, and the same is true of Thomson’s and Rose’s extension of this crow motif. In several scenes, what looks like the shadow of a dark wing appears to sweep over the scrim as the lights go out, lending the production some of its ominous, mysterious aura. Although such moments do not always work perfectly in the large Reid Theatre, they will show well in the Tarragon’s Main Space when the show transfers there.

Such mysterious or mystifying elements suggest the anti-Naturalist theatrical movements that influenced Lorca. Drawing on tenets of Symbolism, plays like Yerma can be seen as aspiring to the universal or the transcendental at the expense of the historical and the particular. Lorca refers to this apprehension of the ethereal or the numinous as the “duende,” an animating spirit that resides within “real” art, a mysterious “force, not a labour.” Yet, in elucidating his understanding of the “duende,” Lorca described the profound connection between Spanish art and Spain as a nation. Indeed, Lorca was himself enmeshed in an intensely political situation and had to cope with a conservative society’s hatred of his homosexuality and beliefs: he was killed in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, possibly because of his political affiliations and/or because of his sexuality.

The historical or political implications of Rocking The Cradle are not so serious but if they are subtle, they are nevertheless real. Consider Walsh’s use of traditional songs from Newfoundland, England, and Ireland. Joan’s singing, like the scrim projections, provide an index to her emotional and mental deterioration. Walsh also uses song for counterpoint, as when Tom continues to sing “Shepherd O Shepherd” offstage, apparently goading Vince, who is confronting Joan in the kitchen.

Tom’s songs are also beautiful; King has a fine voice and he can evoke a range of emotion.  The songs, furthermore, seem to be archetypal: the lyrics of “Shepherd” are very basic, with a mesmerizing repetitive rhythm. Besides, are they not part of a larger Anglo-Celtic culture? Yes, but the music will resonate differently in Newfoundland than in Toronto. Although it is likely that the songs will resonate quite differently for different generations of Newfoundlanders, too, Toronto theatre audiences don’t have the same perspective on the historical period that Walsh dramatizes.

Lorca declared that duende is peculiar to Spain and that of all other nations, only Mexico could understand it. But Toronto is not Mexico and Spain is not Newfoundland: modern Mexico’s cultural heritage has strong Spanish roots; Tom leaves home to labour in the metropolis of a country he has only recently joined. This is not to say that the play, with its singing and  ultimately tragic rural fishers, is like the newly Confederated Newfoundlanders who sought (and seek) their fortune in central Canada; again, it is an imperfect analogy. Instead, it is a reminder that, despite the theatre’s mystifying power, historical perspective remains a barrier in such intercultural projects. Like geomorphology, people carve out their cultures; interest resides not just in the apprehension of mysteriously archetypal similarities but in recognizing and negotiating cultural difference.

Rocking The Cradle
By Des Walsh, Directed by Richard Rose
Co-Produced by the RCA Theatre Company and the Tarragon Theatre
For tickets in St. John’s, call 709-579-4424
For tickets in Toronto, call 416-531-1827

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