Lorca’s presentation of the lives of his matriarch Bernarda Alba and her five daughters in rural Spain remains pertinent and personal today. Forced into eight years of mourning by the death of their father and therefore forbidden to leave the house by the tyrannical rule of their mother, Bernarda’s daughters’ emotional variety gives the original text huge depth.
Through the youngest sibling, Adela, Lorca depicts a deep desire for progress, freedom, modernity and autonomy. She is devastated by the boundaries placed upon her, not only in being physically cooped up, but in being unable to experience sexual liberation as a woman and pursue the man she cares for.
Her sisters, by comparison, are more resigned to their fate, recognising that perhaps as women they are better off being bored and restricted than out in the world where they cannot feel safe. The emotional current in the house is strong and conflicted, as the experiences of the women - their frustration, their boredom, their sadness, their desperation and their resolve - are forced to overlap as they occupy one small shared space. The play is filled with tension and feeling, but this must be subdued: there is no room for it to flow freely in this environment.
Lorca’s strict, cane-wielding, eponymous anti-heroine, Bernarda Alba herself, speaks to a terrifying culture of oppression. She is cruel and violent to her family, confining them to the house and attempting to exert a meticulous level of control over their lives. However, her fixation on gossip and the opinions of those outside of the house demonstrates the extent to which she herself is a victim of a wider system that demands impossible perfection and obedience from women.
It is a challenging balance - the horrific mistreatment of her daughters doesn’t inspire sympathy for the matriarch - but Teresa del Olmo’s performance allows her audience an insight into the structures within which Bernarda is forced to operate, and thus maintains a level of humanity often lost from the role. Del Olmo is a stand-out actress; she is formidable and arresting, but she is no caricature.
The balance between theatricality and realism is a fascinating one in this production. Director Jorge de Juan describes this play as “one of the most realistic that Lorca has got”, and in many ways this is reflected in his production. He is extremely dedicated to Lorca, and invested in being “faithful to his work. We are not trying to invent anything that he didn’t say” (Jorge de Juan).
The script is untouched, the costumes are simple. De Juan does not attempt anything too ambitious or unusual, or anything especially new. In fact, since the last time he put this play on with the Cervantes Theatre, all that he has changed is some of the actresses. On the one hand, this is perhaps wise - it was a critical success, so if it’s not broken, why fix it? On the other hand, however, opportunities to take risks and refresh a production, particularly one with which the creative team is clearly so familiar, haven’t been taken. De Juan is an incredible resource, with such proximity to and reverence for the text - it would have been exciting to see something new. In a post-pandemic world, and with an audience comprised in not unsubstantial part of A Level Spanish students hardly younger than the character of Adela, there feels like there is an even greater scope to bring Lorca’s words into present cultural significance as feelings of confinement and restriction resonate with more people than ever.
Arguably, this kind of creative and contextual reconsideration is not the intention of this production, and their fidelity to the text itself is admirable and effective. But a more flexible recognition of the places in which an audience might find personal connection with the source material could have allowed this play to reach new, original, relevant heights without forcing the team to reinvent the wheel.
That said, they have done a brilliant job working with what they’ve got. The theatre is small, but this lends itself to the ambiance of the play: “having the actresses so close to the audience, and feeling the claustrophobia that they feel when they are in that house, is very important to me. You can feel what the characters are feeling more powerfully in a small space. You can see that they want to get out of there, but they cannot” (Jorge de Juan).
This rings incredibly true - whilst the door-locking sound effect feels unnecessary and somewhat reminiscent of a drama GCSE performance, the artistic choice to make use of a limited space to encourage a feeling of enclosure and inescapability is to the production’s great credit.
Fundamentally, this is an excellent production - well-acted across the board, and deeply loyal to the striking, innovative, brave text from Lorca himself. It allows the material itself to be bold and revolutionary, without attempting to be equally bold and revolutionary in its interpretation, and in doing so presents an insightful, thoughtful piece of theatre which will undoubtedly be enjoyed by mass audiences.
La Casa de Bernarda Alba is showing at the Cervantes Theatre until the 17th of February 2024
