When you think of Billie Piper you either picture a bizarre and short-lived music career in the Nineties, sweet little Rose from Doctor Who, or the saucy minx from Secret Diary of a Call Girl, depending on your generation. However, with Billie Piper's starring role as Yerma in the new adaptation at the Young Vic, all three of these memories are quickly obliterated.
Yerma is a play written in 1934 by the Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca (who was killed for being homosexual at the end of the Spanish Civil War), which tells the story of a childless woman living in rural Spain. Simon Stone reworks the play for the modern generation, both in terms of staging and script.
The staging is extremely powerful, and so engaging that there is no need for an interval – it would only interrupt. The audience circles a glass cube, in which the actors are enclosed for the whole performance – the set changing only slightly. For the most part, the cube is the sitting room of Yerma and her husband John's new house. Between each scene, which can last from seconds to minutes, a breathy, eerie, chorus fill the pitch black interlude. The chorus' tempo quickens as the panic heightens and the play unravels. Each scene is introduced with a striking statement sprawling across big screens above the cube, such as or "And then there was a baby" and "The Descent".
The script, which follows Yerma and John's desperate struggle to have children, is stuffed with expletives and lewd, sexual references that even stretch to anal sex. But it's not shocking because it's lewd, it's shocking because it's uncomfortably real. When Yerma casually questions her rugged Australian husband about why he enjoys "bum sex" so much, he squirms and we cringe. They regularly tiff about his low sex drive, and about his time spent away from home. The conversation is so mimetic of real life – un-dramatic, awkward, stilted, slow – that stutters blend in seamlessly, and often it feels like the couple are improvising completely.
What begins humorous however, ends in tragedy. Billie Piper's fun, light-hearted character becomes so obsessed with the child she can never have, that she is unable to accept life as it is. Her obsession turns into mania and depression, and corrodes everything it touches. Like with the play's earlier humour, this struggle, too, is all too relatable for many viewers, both who have lost children, and who are unable to conceive. Piper lives and breathes Yerma's grief to such an extent her face looked wrought with pain throughout the final quarter of this preview performance. The claustrophobic nature of the cube traps the actors and their turmoil in what feels like a suffocating prison. They pace like zoo animals and their downfall seems inescapable.
When Piper got up to take a bow, her face was haggard, as if she'd lived Yerma's whole life in that single hour.
Yerma is running from 14 August to 31 August at the Young Vic
