Bull / Fight @ Summerhall

Following sellout runs for their production of Antigone at the 2024 and 2025 Fringe, Mythography Collective have returned with another tale of embattled individuals caught between private and public personas. Bull / Fight, produced in collaboration with Macrobert Arts Centre, imagines the last days of Federico García Lorca, the Andalusian poet, playwright and outspoken socialist, shot by Franco’s nationalist militia.

Nowhere in Spain is more closely associated with bullfighting than Andalusia. Here, the bull is authoritarianism, censorship and the rising tides of brutality spilling out onto the streets of Spain. Our matador is Lorca, forced to dance around its sharp horns. Yet while Lorca retains his faith in love, passion and the truth of human experience, he realises that missteps will be punished like never before.

There is genuine pathos when the cost of courage is paid, and a spirited radical is consigned to an unmarked grave. The play then moves into a more abstract phase, a bacchanalia of relentless violent imagery, the cast swirling like a Greek chorus performing Picasso’s Guernica with heads thrown to the sky amidst a thicket of anguished limbs. They list the crimes of warmongers and the lamentations of their victims. They build until the misery cannot be heaped any higher, and the play lurches into a plea for hope and healing.

As a spectacle, Bull / Fight has much to offer, especially in such close confines, and the central metaphor works beautifully. However, the characters are lost in an impersonal tangle of movement and misery. The murder of Federico García Lorca was not merely an act of violence; it was the extinguishing of a rare and precious light. Perhaps if his character was developed and his radical politics, charisma and plight shown more clearly in the initial portion of the play, the tragedy of the second would hit much harder.

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Bull / Fight, Summerhall (Former Women’s Locker Room), until 31 Aug, (not 24), 11.30am, £14.00-16.50