It is the unexpected - and some might say unlikely - theatrical juggernaut of the summer, reducing British audiences to tears and raising critic after critic to their feet.
Tickets to Yerma, staring Olivier Award winner Billie Piper and Australian actor, screenwriter and director Brendan Cowell, sold out within minutes.
“I never read Yerma, embarrassingly, and I barely knew who Billie Piper was, so I was coming in completely blind," Cowell told SBS World News.
“And what an amazing thing to happen - everyone knew it would be kind of good, but no one knew it would really draw this reaction, which has been unfathomable and unlike anything I have ever seen.”
While disappointed fans line up outside London's Young Vic Theatre night after night, hoping to score a rare return ticket, Australian audiences are being offered the chance to experience the critically acclaimed performance from the comfort of their local cinema.
The Young Vic Theatre in London Source: SBS/Brett Mason
“I think it’s a great thing to use technology to bring a really popular piece of theatre to the world," Cowell said.
Performances of Yerma will be broadcast live via a satellite feed from discreetly positioned cameras inside the theatre to more than 2,500 cinemas in 60 countries, including ten big screens in Australia.
"My sister, Belinda, has booked out an entire cinema at the Dendy Newtown in late September and all the family and friends are going. I mean, that’s incredible."
Yerma from 1934 to 2017: A modern adaptation
Yerma - Spanish for ‘barren’ – is a radical revival of dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca's original 1934 “tragic poem”, which painfully plots a young woman’s desperate – and ultimately fruitless – journey to motherhood.
While retaining the play’s orignal themes, Australian director Simon Stone (a mate of Cowell's - the pair "road trip" together in Europe) has totally adapted Lorca's classic to modern day, middle class London life.
“The heartbeat coursing through the veins of Yerma is indestructible," Stone said.
The cast of six perform inside a fully-enclosed glass stage – a kind of foreboding fishtank of furious frustration and futility.
“It's not for the fainthearted," Cowell said.
“Simon (Stone) creates a very difficult off-stage world - we're running around in the dark, sets are being raised up and roled off and we have to run around the theatre and get quickly back on a stage while trying not to run into a glass wall."
“So the administration of this show is perhaps even more difficult than what we’re doing onstage."
By the end of the 90 minute performance the cast, especially Piper, are visibly exhausted and many in the audience wipe away tears.
“It’s a tragedy about a couple trying to have a baby and struggling but, in real simple terms, it charts a fifteen year relationship and we’ve all had a love relationship.”
Billie Piper in the lead role of Yerma: "A woman driven to the unthinkable by her desperate desire to have a child". Source: SBS World News
"Everybody comes out and the foyer is like a kind of therapy room with drinks in it, where people just come up to us and share similar stories as if we’re old friends and it's kind of insane and magic in terms of the openness that happens.”
“There are things in life that are taboo - that we don’t talk about – youth suicide, IVF and how difficult that can be for couples: miscarriages, abortions, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, lots of these things that we kind of don't talk about because they’re inherently embarassing.
"They have a human failure in them – but that is so untrue, they're just taboo for no reason.
“I think why this play is brilliant, is because it brings to the light the struggle that people don’t really discuss. And they should."
Yerma and theatre in the smartphone era
Despite a seemingly insatiable appetite for tickets, Cowell admits he sometimes catches audience members tuning out.
“There are still people who keep their phones on during the show – who I feel a sudden urge to headbutt – checking it because that’s fifteen minutes where they haven’t been able to check their Pinterest updates or whatever the hell they’re doing.
"And it’s often not teenagers, it’s people in their 40s and 50s that are so obsessed with these gadgets."
In a world where we increasingly communicate with our thumbs and phones, Cowell says he finds it refreshing that Yerma has people talking.
"I think the more one thing happens, the more people seek the opposite. You look at podcasts. People are listening to people talk.
"You wouldn’t have believed that fifteen years ago - that people wouldn't be listening to music - they’d be listening to just a voice for two hours. Theatre is people talking as well."
"So I think the more society becomes reductive, the more people are actually reading novels and seeking out the theatrical experience, because it’s the opposite of what live and I think that’s where art comes into play, when it can provide an opposite.
"To sit in the dark and watch a performance, a performance that is unlike tomorrow night, and the next night, is something people find utterly refreshing."
The troubled history and the politics of Yerma
When Yerma premiered in 1934, right-wing groups interrupted the performance.
Lorca was assassinated two years later. His body has never been recovered.
"He was a gay man and he was murdered for speaking out and possibly for being gay - this could've been a play about the fact that he could never have a child either," Cowell said.
Cowell, who quit Twitter after publicly calling for former Prime Minister Tony Abbott to "show some balls" and intervene in the executions of convicted drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, is a vocal supporter of marriage equality.
He says he finds talking about the tone of Australia's same sex marriage debate with fellow actors in London "pretty embarrassing".
“I agree with most of my friends in saying that it seems quite ridiculous to spend $120 million on something that people don’t have a problem with," Cowell said.
“Everyone has a gay brother, personal trainer, boss, friend - no one cares – it's over.
“I think we should give gay and lesbian people marriage altogether for ten years, see if they can up the statistics.
"If they can’t, maybe we’ll share it, because it’s not like straight people are doing a great job of marriage.
"We’re failing it half the time and even inside those marriages that are successful there’s domestic violence, there’s all these other problems, so why have we got such a claim on something that we’re not that good at ourselves?
"Being over here at dinner parties when people say ‘so you treat the refugees quite badly and you won’t let the gays get married?’ and trying to stand up in those situations is hard and I wish it wasn't.
"It’s pretty embarrassing."
NT Live will screen Yerma in select Australian cinemas from 21 September. Since its launch in 2009, NT Live broadcasts have been seen by over seven million people at 2,500 venues in 60 countries.
