Yerma, Watched From a Distance

This piece reflects on a recorded production of Yerma, viewed via Drama Online’s National Theatre Collection.

Simon Stone’s adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s Yerma is potent and unrelenting. Contained within a rectangular glass box, Billie Piper delivers a brutally honest, grounded and deeply human performance as Her, a woman whose wants, needs and sense of self begin to fracture under the weight of expectation, jealousy and isolation.

Her watches those around her move seemingly untroubled through life. Brendan Cowell as John, Charlotte Randle as Mary, John MacMillan as Victor, Maureen Beattie as Helen and Thalissa Teixeira as Des exist in a world where past, present and future collide without consequence. For Her, those same forces slowly pull everything apart.

The play opens as Her and John move into a new house following their wedding, ten years into their relationship. The moment feels hopeful and uneasy in equal measure, as such moments often do. Her runs a successful blog, writing openly about her attempts to get pregnant and the quiet misogyny that shapes how women are spoken to and spoken about. Her words resonate with others who recognise themselves in her experience, finding solidarity in the act of being seen.

With stability, success and love apparently in place, the next expected step is clear. A child becomes not simply a desire, but an inevitability. What follows is a series of highs, lows and revelations that steadily loosen Her’s grip on the world. As others around her conceive with ease, she is left asking why the one thing she wants most remains stubbornly out of reach.

Under Stone’s direction, with design by Lizzie Clachan and music and sound by Stefan Gregory, the production moves at a relentless pace. Scenes fracture and reform with almost impossible speed, time collapsing in on itself as years pass in moments. Watching the recorded production, you become acutely aware of how quickly life is moving for everyone except Her, who desperately needs the world to pause.

The glass box becomes both a home and a trap. As seasons change and relationships strain, Her’s sense of purpose slips further away. IVF cycles offer fleeting hope before disappointment sets in again, each attempt carrying the promise that this might be the moment everything realigns. Instead, dissociation takes hold. Her becomes increasingly untethered from the life she is expected to want, let alone live.

There is something profoundly unsettling about watching this unravelling from a distance. The camera allows intimacy without intervention. You feel voyeuristic, flinching as Her endures humiliation, loss and emotional violence inside her transparent enclosure. Some moments undoubtedly land differently through a screen than they might in the room, yet the production’s cinematic language lends itself remarkably well to recording. The claustrophobia, the repetition and the inevitability remain intact.

What lingers most is the sense that this story is preventable. Yerma speaks to the consequences of failed communication, of assumptions left unchallenged and of suffering that is minimised until it becomes impossible to ignore. It is difficult not to recognise something of yourself in Her’s story, whether as the person unravelling or as the bystander watching it happen.

This production is not gentle. At times, it quite literally yells at its audience. Yet that intensity feels warranted. Stone’s adaptation, and the ensemble’s commitment to its unconventional way of working, result in a piece that is confrontational, necessary and deeply affecting.

Should this production ever return to the stage, it is one I would seek out in person. Until then, encountering Yerma through the National Theatre Collection remains a powerful reminder of theatre’s ability to hold a mirror to lives lived under pressure, and to ask what happens when the world keeps moving while someone is quietly falling apart.