Manor Park actors’ Spanish tragedy grips audience

Parents, staff and students watched gritty performances of Blood Wedding given by group of Manor Park pupils.

The cast of 33 pupils, aged between 12 and 16, at Little Ilford School spent six months rehearsing for the play which centres on a woman who runs away with her lover on the day of her wedding.

The girls in the play wore burkas while the boys dressed in black. The play is an interpretation of the Spanish tragedy by members of the school’s drama department and dealt with rela life issues such as love, death and revenge.

The three performances also included a live Spanish Guitar played by Mr Tim Bergin, a science teacher in the school.

Annette Henry, spokeswoman for the school said: “We always like to think outside the box so our students are not going to be reproducing Grease or going down the Glee route. They are always going to do something that gives the audience something to think about.”

Blood Wedding is based on a story by Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca which bears the title Bodas de Sangre, or ‘Wedding of Blood’. The title and theme came from a murder committed in 1928 in the town of Nijar in the Spanish province of Almer�a, when a young woman ran off with her cousin moments before her wedding to a local man. The cousin was then shot dead by the prospective bridegroom’s brother. Lorca read about the incident in a newspaper and kept the cutting until he came to write the play in 1932.