Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: EJ Raymond, Ricci McLeod, Irene Macdougall, Alison Halstead, Millie Turner, Miles Mitchell, Gerard McDermott, Ann Louis Ross. Amy Conachan.

There’s nothing like a wedding to enhance a good blood feud, to really get to the bottom of the relationship between one family and another, united in only one thing, absolute hatred of each other.

Lorca’s Blood Wedding explores the relationship of such feud but with that subtle twist that makes it stand out, makes it drive home the serrated cake knife home even further, as the least likely person on the day is the one calling the shots.

In a play that is already noted for its use of the comedy and tragedy, and what wedding isn’t a tremendous use of both as emotions are kept just below the surface and secrets are often mislaid, misspoke and left hanging in the air as the officiator asks the fateful question involving impediment and choices.

Choices, in the end it all boils down to choices and Graeae and Jenny Sealy have opened up that singular avenue in such a way that this production of Blood Wedding is one that stands out for the right choices being made. In a world where disability rights, where the disabled have had questions of what they can achieve again put to them, whether they are blind, deaf, mobility impaired or any number of disabilities, out in the open or indeed hidden, the world may have opened up it access but there is still a lot of locked doors, barriers made and ill informed opinions to change and it never helps the cause when Governments feel fit to label all with one brush.

Choices, Graeae have made the right ones with adding a new and absolutely pivotal thought to Blood Wedding, with the bride and the groom’s mother both living with disability and their own desires and secret heartaches, the play opens up a terrific sense of achievement that is impossible to ignore and is all the better for making the choice about talent and not about audience perception.

In both EJ Raymond’s and Amy Conachan’s performances, what comes across is intense truth, a deliberate keenness which is impossible to ignore and above all supremely well played. The challenge of hypocrisy of Ms. Raymond’s Agnes, a woman so profoundly deaf but who dislikes disabled people is one to savour and shows the division that others set up in the disabled fraternity in which to keep them from being united as one, a tender and genuinely stirring performance.

Blood Wedding is an enjoyable, deeply funny and touching play and one that kicks out against type well. It turns on a sixpence and the crushing finale is one in which should not be missed.

Ian D. Hall