Oxford Theatre Guild aims high next week when it brings Frederico Garcia Lorca’s 1932 play Blood Wedding to Oxford Playhouse. Replete with passion, deception and death, the play is centred upon a wedding in which almost everyone involved bears some previous baggage — a long-standing vendetta between two families in rural Spain is at the heart of the matter.

So emblematic is the drama that not many of the characters bear real names: thus we have, for example, the Mother (played by Donna Doubtfire), the Father (Andrew Whiffin), the Bride (Mica Forrest, pictured with James Riley, as Leonardo) and the Groom (Craig Finlay). Planned by Lorca as a component part of “a trilogy of the Spanish earth”, tragedy is never far away — with even Death putting in a late appearance (as a symbolic beggar). The Moon also appears, in the form of Daniel Irving and Charlotte Evans, the Guild’s choreographer.

By the time he wrote this play — four years before his death during the Spanish Civil War — Lorca was very much a part of the avant-garde movement in Spain, a poet and friend of Salvador Dali. He was also a trained classical pianist — and didn’t actually become a writer until his piano teacher had died. Lorca then became much influenced by Spanish folklore, flamenco and the ballads of Andalusian gypsies; the scenes involving the wedding feast in Blood Wedding in this production owe a lot to input from the flamenco guitarist Rafael (no stranger lately to both the Playhouse and the New Theatre) and an original musical score by local music teacher Trevor Davies.

The production is designed by Vince Haig and the cast of more than 20 actors is directed by Alice Evans — whose last outing in this role with the Guild was with its 2009 production of Alice’s Adventures Underground.

01865 305305 (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).