18
Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1933) in adaptation: 
Marina Carr’s Blood Wedding: After Federico García Lorca 
(2019) 
Theo Saltissi 
Marina Carr and Yaël Farber’s 2019 adaptation of Blood Wedding does not simply 
modernise Lorca’s play. It does something quieter and, at times, more  
uncomfortable: it changes what kind of tragedy Blood Wedding is. In Lorca’s  
original, suffering is shaped by desire, family honour, violence, land, and a world 
that feels almost immovably bound to blood. The tragedy unfolds with the  
pressure of inevitability, as if the knife had already been sharpened long before the 
play begins. Carr and Farber, however, shift this pressure into a context that feels 
more historically recognisable: rural Ireland, or more precisely the strange hybrid 
world of “Andalusia, County Offaly” (Carr, 2019). In this adaptation, fate does not 
disappear, but it becomes harder to trust, with destiny beginning to look like  
inheritance, patriarchy, communal surveillance and social habit. This matters, 
because contemporary adaptations of modernist drama can make the past newly 
questionable. As Linda Hutcheon argues, adaptation is “repetition without  
replication” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2012:7), and Carr’s version repeats Lorca’s 
plot while changing the ideological pressure around it. I argue that the adaptation 
exposes a key tension in the original: what appears “natural” or inevitable,  
particularly the movement from desire to violence, begins to look distinctly  
constructed under contemporary scrutiny. The adaptation does not discard Lorca 
so much as argue with him. Although, I want to resist the temptation to crown Carr 
and Farber’s version as simply more enlightened. While it gains feminist sharpness 
and more of a historically legible account of violence, it arguably loses its symbolic 
and poetic strangeness that gives Lorca’s tragedy its wider resonance.  
I start with the question of fate. Blood Wedding is a play that seems to know where 
it is going almost before anyone in it has made a choice. At first, the action is  
deceptively prosaic: the Bridegroom asks his Mother for a knife. It is an everyday 
request which the Mother hears in the context of all of the history of male violence. 
The knife is not merely a knife; it is, in equal parts, memory‚ mourning‚ masculinity‚ 
murder and prophecy. In the first scene‚ when she tells us that her husband and 
son were killed by the Félix family‚ her words turn the knife into something almost 
cursed‚ a weapon that might belong not in the kitchen but in the grave (Lorca‚ 
1933:39-40). From the first instance‚ Lorca teaches us that objects in this world are 
never neutral. They always carry blood. They remember. Moreover, this is another 
reason for the power of Lorca’s tragedy: before we know who the Bride is‚ or that 
Leonardo has come back‚ or that there is going to be a wedding‚ we are already 
sucked into a circular world of fate. The Mother is moved to tears by her loss, for 
her speech goes around and comes around and attaches to the Bridegroom‚ the 

View this content as a flipbook by clicking here.