by Jonathan Grant

“When he is Federico is nor heat neither cold, For he is Federico” – That is the explanation chosen for this novel concatenation of Lorca’s works. For Hace Federico, Emily Lewis fuses extracts from across Lorca’s diverse body of poems, articles, plays, and song lyrics into a story of love and loss during the time of Franco’s nationalist uprising.

Featuring dramatic tales that were uncanny shadows almost predicting Lorca’s own untimely death, and written as they were during the ‘Silver Age’ of 1920s Spain alongside contemporaries Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, the production has a surrealist and revolutionary feel that will be sure to leave you yearning for tapas and the sun of the Costas in an age before mass tourism.

This one-man one-woman show is, as expected from one of Spain’s greatest-ever writers, beautifully lyrical and are, even when translated into English with subtitles that are marked in white light on the walls above and behind the heads of our Spanish-speaking cast, wonderfully invocative. Lines such as “The house is full of rumours and water warms itself in the glass” just create a magical feel.

Nor have the words lost their poignancy as the years have past since Lorca’s own passing, dealing as they do with eternal issues of war and love; “A river that flows for minutes but costs us years” is just as relevant to the blood spilt in Iraq, Lebanon or Afghanistan today as it was in Granada, the Basque or Andalusia seventy years ago.

Yet, whilst Hace Federico showcases the undisputed lyrical talents of Lorca, and sounds equally beautiful coming from the Spanish lips of our actors as it reads in English, the production itself is clumsy. The lazy treatment of the subtitles, presented in large blocks of text high on the walled backdrop, make it both tough to follow as the audience constantly read ahead of the cast and must continually shift their eyes between this high positioning of text and the flamenco-costumed cast.

The soft blue and red hues of lighting, and the flamenco guitarists, spectacular in their freestyle performance as the audience gathers in this cosy 60-seater theatre, are wonderfully deployed to evoke memories of rural Spain throughout the hour-long running of this show. But this cannot overcome the essential failing of Hace Federico – that the audience is essentially reading the works of Lorca, rather than watching a performance.

The Arcola Theatre’s “Viva Lorca” season, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of Lorca’s untimely death at the hands of Franco’s cronies, takes a collection of one of Spain’s greatest writers to a wider, English-speaking, audience. It runs until the September 23, evoking memories of nights of sangria and castanets.

Hace Frederico is at the Arcola until August 12, in Spanish with English surtitles.