Contemporary German Plays I: Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Heiner Muller: Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kippahardt, Heiner Muller, Vol. 96 Book

Lorca manages the nearly unmanagable: to be a poet within the world of modern theatre. This long-forgotten tradition is what makes him so unique compared to his contemporaries. Yet within the poetry, you find harsh criticisms and the views and opinions of a man way ahead of his time. The blood creeps through this particular collection, sliding from one page to the next, engulfing the reader and the character is a blood wave whose force I can only visualise, in my mind, with S. Kubrick's most infamous "lift scene". Yerma is the one play that touched me most. The story resonates sadly until this day: A woman, today, of "advanced age", unmarried and childless, is frowned upon and often told - even by other women - that she will never know what it means "to be a woman". The discrimination of older childless women is worrying me today as much as it probably occupied Lorca. The presumption that motherhood equals womanhood needs to be seriously revised and Lorca's "blood trilogy" can only help in this sense. In some ways, he was a true feminist. Truer than many self-proclaimed feminists of these days anyway. A visionary book, oozing the blood of humanity on every page, without doubt.