Two theatre companies. One cast. Two wildly different plays. All at Victoria’s Belfry Theatre.
With fascism on one end and farce on the other, the new Great Works Festival – launched by Puente Theatre and Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre – explores what it means to live in a fractured world through two classics that speak volumes about power, fear and resistance.
Blood Wedding, rewritten by Mercedes Bátiz‑Benét, stares unflinchingly at the violence that erupts from othering. La Bête, directed by Brian Richmond, laughs in the face of pretension and power.
Together, they hold a mirror to our fractured world – one cracking under pressure, the other cackling at its own absurdity.
Blood Wedding
Federico García Lorca’s 1932 masterpiece centres on a village bride torn between a safe marriage and a dangerous love.
Bátiz‑Benét has rebuilt the play from the inside out, keeping the love‑triangle plot but foregrounding “the cost of othering” in a society “where fear of difference becomes hate and hate becomes violence.”
“Lorca wrote Blood Wedding at a time when fascism was brewing in Europe,” Bátiz‑Benét told Monday Magazine. “We are living in a time where history is repeating itself – division, fear and violence are once again shaping our world. This play is not just a tragedy of doomed lovers; it’s a warning.”
Her Mexican‑Spanish roots make Lorca “the language of my bones,” and she calls the poet‑playwright “a compass for anyone writing against oppression.”
La Bête
David Hirson’s 1991 comedy, delivered entirely in dazzling rhymed couplets, pits Elomire’s refined troupe against Valere, a narcissistic street performer foisted upon them by a royal patron.
Richmond sees the clash as painfully current:
“This is truly a play for our time,” Richmond says on Belfry.bc.ca.
“As we struggle with our disbelief that our world can be so quickly and radically transformed, we all need to find the way to break the thrall brought on by the violence of ego.
“Hirson’s hilarious and brilliant play offers us such a cure – if only for an evening.”
One cast, two worlds
The productions run in full repertory: the same 10 actors alternate roles, sometimes switching from Andalusian tragedy to French farce within hours.
“It’s exhilarating, really,” Bátiz‑Benét says of the pace of staging two radically different shows per day, “that’s what attracts them to this kind of work. Yes, of course, it’s tiring and exhausting, but it’s exhilarating too, and that’s what carries them.”
With just two weeks and three days of rehearsal for each show, the pace is relentless, but, she insists, “that pressure forges an ensemble.”
La Bête opens July 29; Blood Wedding follows July 30. Performances alternate through Aug.10 at the Belfry Theatre. For tickets, visit greatworksfestival.ca/tickets
