Adored by audiences around the world, Blood Wedding navigates the devastating tension between tradition and desire, uncovering hidden yearnings that make a close-knit community fall apart. Featuring a live, original score inspired by Flamenco, Full Moon Theatre presents a razor-sharp adaptation of a Spanish masterpiece that demands to be staged again and again. We sat down with Director and Translator Emma Nihill Alcorta to discuss their approach to Blood Wedding.
What drew you to creating a new translation of Blood Wedding?
In 2024, I played Ophelia in a production of Hamlet that toured around Europe and Costa Rica. For our performance at the Teatro Nacional de Costa Rica, our partner production company in San José developed Spanish subtitles that were projected onto the proscenium arch throughout the show. Watching my colleagues perform under the subtitles during various tech runs I just thought, this is really special. I’ve always loved the act of translation for its ability to forge cross-cultural dialogue. In my professional life, translation has brought people together by being live, active, and shaped by the community which it serves. There are many beautiful translations of Blood Wedding, but I was hungry to develop one that spoke directly to the unique blend of Hispanophone and Anglophone perspectives in our ensemble and creative team. I wanted to make a Blood Wedding that celebrates the melding of twentieth-century Andalucía with twenty-first century Oxford, preserving sections of Lorca’s original Spanish whilst radically reimagining certain characters and sections of dialogue. Rather than doggedly imitating the original, I was also determined to make the English text sing on its own terms with its own voice.
How did you balance remaining faithful to Lorca’s poetic language while making it resonate with a contemporary English-speaking audience?
My first draft of the translation was a meticulous mimicry of the Spanish which stayed as close as possible to Lorca’s text and the rhythms of his verse. I had Bodas de Sangre next to me as I revised each scene, constantly cross-checking. From this process I was convinced that moments of Spanish poetry had to remain – it felt too beautiful to remove entirely. When I was confident that I had the skeleton of the script, I put Lorca away and treated the text almost as a piece of new writing. I considered character motivation, structure, and tonal arc, and heavily adapted particular scenes to make the journey of the characters feel urgent and relevant in an Anglophone context. I hope the result is something like St Jerome’s translation technique of “sense for sense”, rather than “word for word” – adapting the language in order to capture the burning soul of Lorca’s drama for a new cultural context.
How did your dual role as both translator and director shape the vision of this production?
Lorca’s imagery is so rich that if you just listen to the text, a whole world is built in your mind. Everything I’ve imagined for the production has come from my conversation with Lorca’s writing. In this way, translation and direction are both inextricably linked to the vivid vision I have for Blood Wedding. With my thorough grounding in the Spanish text and my sheer love for the story, I am striving to create a clear foundation onto which our wonderful cast and crew can build a powerful piece of theatre.
Can you describe the collaborative process with the Full Moon Theatre team? How do you encourage student actors to bring their best to a production as intense as Blood Wedding?
This production very simply would not exist without our extraordinary creative and directorial team. We started Full Moon Theatre with the conviction that collaboration creates the best work. This belief has been borne out in rehearsal after rehearsal where the jigsaw puzzles of music, dance, fight choreography and costume design have come together to create utter magic. It’s been a really exciting process of matching draft score to draft choreography, feeling the aural and visual world of Blood Wedding come to life as we continue to rehearse the text.
I am very lucky to have drama school training and three years of touring experience. I do my best to bring this into the rehearsal room and provide the kind of directorial support I would have responded to as a younger actor. I’m drawing from fundamental principles that I learned at Arts Ed and on the road, providing enough of the scaffold to let the talent of the ensemble shine through, whilst also allowing for plenty of freedom to explore and play. I’m also astonished by the generosity and dedication of our actors and am learning so much from them. Perhaps counterintuitively, I think that the key to rehearsing a tragedy is to have fun, be silly, be curious, and build trust. From this foundation, we’ve been able to tap into some of the deepest miseries of the human experience from a place of active empathy and love.
Were there any discoveries – personal, cultural, or artistic – you made during this process that surprised you?
There have been several! I’ve been so thrilled by the amount of enthusiasm I’ve encountered for bilingual, cross-cultural theatre here in Oxford. When I hear English and Spanish intermingled in rehearsals and meetings, or listen to drafts of Elsa Vass-de-Zomba’s Flamenco-inspired score, I’m overjoyed that this kind of storytelling is not only possible, but emphatically welcomed by so many people.
Our brilliant Language and Culture Advisor, Laura del Alisal, has also helped me understand how integral Lorca’s musical training was to his youth and his writing. As I was translating, the intrinsic musicality of Lorca’s language repeatedly astonished me and fundamentally shaped the rhythms and syntax of my own adaptation.
If you could ask Lorca one question about Blood Wedding, what would it be?
Si fueras la novia, ¿habrías huido, o te habrías quedado? (If you were the Bride, would you have run away, or would you have stayed?)
Blood Wedding plays at the Oxford Playhouse 4 – 7th June. Tickets are available here.