Ahead of the London premiere of Barney Norris’ Blood Wedding at Clapham’s Omnibus Theatre, star Alix Dunmore talks to The Theatre Playbook about this adaptation of Spanish playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre, accents and how she balances shifting from stage to screen.
From rural Spain to the West Country, Frederico Garcia Lorca’s classic play Blood Wedding (originally titled Bodas de Sangre) has been transported to contemporary England by writer Barney Norris. Yet the dark comedy retains its focus on the dreams and fears of a young couple and questions of love and fate.
For star Alix Dunmore – who lines up among the cast for the new play that makes its London debut at Clapham’s Omnibus Theatre on Wednesday, April 30 – it’s a “brilliant” adaptation that stands alongside another recent Lorca-inspired show, the Billie Piper-led Yerma.
“His stuff is really like, ‘Oh my God, the drama, the tragedy, the magical realism…’ But then because it’s so culturally different here [compared to Lorca’s 1930s Spain], it’s a whole attitude shift,” she tells The Theatre Playbook. “It really brings out the mundanity of English life, English attitudes and the English ways of just buttoning ourselves up and closing ourselves down rather than wailing in the streets and beating our breasts like more hot-blooded cultures might. You’ve still got the drama and the tragedy and the magical realism. It’s just like, ‘How would a working mum from Wiltshire deal with that?’
“And I just I think it’s brilliantly done. Barney comes from around Salisbury, so he just knows these people really well. He writes how they would react in these circumstances – and it’s really funny as well. I think people will really identify and we’ll know people like that.”
In Norris’ Blood Wedding, tension run high in a village on the edge of Salisbury Plain as the happy anticipation of a wedding suddenly turns ominous. Georgie, 22 and the bride-to-be, is torn between her fiancé Rob and Lee, her ex. The seeds of disaster are sown.
Dunmore plays Helen, the mother of the groom, Rob, who has been left “weary” by his whirlwind romance with older woman Georgie.
“It’s all happened very quickly,” she explains, “so she’s worried because of that. She’s gently and increasingly less gently just trying to get them to slow down and maybe postpone it, which is annoying for my son.
“We get to see the preparations for the wedding on the day. Then we see the aftermath – and there is an encounter between Georgie and her ex-boyfriend.”
Presented by Two’s Company and Karl Sydow, in association with Tilly Film, the director is Tricia Thorns, with set design by Alex Marker, costume design by Carla Joy Evans, lighting design by Neill Brinkworth and sound design by Dominic Bilkey.
Dunmore knew she was in with a chance for the role of Helen after a readthrough of the script last year, when she remembers being told, “We’ll almost certainly ask you to do it. We’ll have to see what happens.” Then when she was confirmed for the role a couple of months ago, she began to “gently” start looking at her lines.
“It’s really nice to go into a rehearsal process being familiar enough, not that you’ve set how to do it in your head, but that you don’t have to be holding the script all the time,” she says.
Dunmore had previously worked with Thorns and producer Graham Cowley – “this may be my eighth or ninth time working for them,” she says – and has been cast by them as “a lot of posh women who have a breakdown in act three.”
The actor admits that’s her comfort zone, but Helen is “such a different character than I usually play. I think things are up for grabs,” she says. “It will be really interesting to see what happens. I’m going to be doing a very different accent than my own. That’s going to inform it [her performance] a lot. And it’s a completely different life than mine. Completely different experiences. We’ll see.”
Perfecting a new accent is part of the fun for Dunsmore, however, who pairs acting for stage and screen with her work as an accent coach.
“Well, it’s my thing. I’m an accent coach so I absolutely love doing other accents,” she says. “I also trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic so I could do ‘Bristol’ very well. This is a bit different, a bit more rural, but I’ve been researching it. I’d like to get as specific as possible. But in the end, as long as the members of the same family sound the same, then we’re all right.”
But one thing that won’t be exactly the same is the performance of Blood Wedding each night through its run, as Dunmore considers theatre to be a fluid art where each show and performance builds and evolves from rehearsals to the last curtain call.
“Audiences might not see such a massive difference, but I think we feel it as actors,” she says. “It’s not huge, but there’s more detail in there. When you’re on stage and you can sense the reactions of the audience, you have a better idea of what works. And it’s not just about getting laughs, it’s about moving people. You have to be in front of an audience to work that kind of stuff out.”
While Dunmore’s recent stage credits include The Silver Chord, Don’t Destroy Me, Julius Caesar and Bard in the Yard, she has also collected numerous roles in television series such as Sister Boniface Mysteries, There She Goes and Call The Midwife.
It means she’s well placed to understand the similarities and differences between performing for theatre and the screen, for which she has to remember “how human beings behave.”
“Because when you do stage, you can be a bit more heightened and I’m a fairly large person anyway in terms of my facial expressions and being quite gregarious,” she continues. “Those people absolutely exist, but not as much as people who are a bit more reserved in their movements and their facial expressions, and that is generally what you need for TV.
“I absolutely love doing theatre. It’s a shame you can’t really make a comfortable living from doing it. But because it can be different every night, every audience gets a unique experience. If you don’t feel like you gave it your best the night before, then you get to sit down and think, ‘Ok, how do I sort that out?’”
She adds: “You think you’ve got your performance by the end of rehearsals, but by the end of the show it will be different. It will have moved on even from then just because of playing with your fellow actors even more as you go, and I just absolutely love that. So my process is hopefully to get the lines as familiar as possible, work on the accent but stay open because they might want to take it in a direction that I haven’t thought about yet.”
But if there’s one thing Dunmore does know about Blood Wedding, “I do think it’s really funny,” she says. The actor also believes it will be very relatable to mothers of sons like her character Helen, who worries about how she has raised her son and often ventures into “therapy speak.”
“You always find humour in recognising people you know, or even yourself in the characters, and I think it’s just so well adapted in terms of these people are so real,” Dunmore says. “I think people will be like, ‘Oh, that’s just like my mum. That’s just like my son. That’s just like my brother’s girlfriend.’ Whatever. And find humour in that.”
Blood Wedding runs at the Clapham Omnibus from Wednesday, April 30 – Saturday, May 24, 2025. Tickets: Blood Wedding
Top image: Alix Dunmore (centre) in rehearsals for Blood Wedding. (All rehearsal images supplied)