A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad

Assassinated by fascist thugs in the opening days of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca is a martyred icon of the left. His final play, The House of Bernarda Alba – part of the so-called rural trilogy, alongside Blood Wedding and Yerma – foreshadows the personal and political conflicts that culminated in a coup against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic. The eponymous protagonist, a maternal tyrant, exploits honour and respectability as a pretext for effectively keeping five unmarried daughters under house arrest. Never performed in Lorca’s lifetime, the play’s global premiere took place in Buenos Aires in 1945. Since then, Bernarda Alba has become his most staged play, largely because it is assumed, somewhat reductively, to be political and naturalistic. Recent productions by the National Theatre in London and the Madrid-based Centro Dramático Nacional/National Dramatic Centre suggest it remains a problematic classic, a play that attracts and wrong-steps practitioners and audiences alike.

In Autumn 2023, billboards around London advertised a National Theatre production: the striking image of lead actresses Harriet Walter matched with an iconic catchphrase, “a daughter who disobeys is no longer a daughter”, was pure marketing gold. The combination of a veteran theatre actresses – who achieved late mainstream recognition with her role as the matriarch in the HBO series Succession – with a eulogy for freedom is difficult to beat. Once in the theatre, Merle Hensel’s arresting green dollhouse like design, occupying almost all of the vast stage of the Littleton, allowed the audience to simultaneously observe the play’s different rooms and characters – the house of Bernarda Alba was as much the star as Walter herself. Geographical and temporal specificity were eschewed by substituting white rooms for pastel colours that evoked images of the deep south of the United States more than Andalusia. Hensel and director Rebecca Frecknall had previously collaborated on a well-received production at of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida Theatre, which later got a West End transfer. Staking a claim to be the most foul-mouthed Bernarda yet, Walter paced the rooms of the house in a manner and style more befitting the faux respectability of a drink- dependant Tennessee Williams protagonist than a rural Andalusian Catholic matriarch.

Widowed for the second time, Bernarda seeks to enforce eight years of mourning in the all-female household she shares with a dementing mother, five daughters (aged between twenty and thirty-nine) and Poncia, a maid. Angustias, Bernarda’s only child by her first marriage, is rich through inheritance; despite being less physically attractive than her younger sisters, she is courted by local hunk Pepe el Romano. The suggestion (not even implicit in Lorca’s original) was introduced that Angustias had an incestuous relationship with her stepfather. Pepe el Romano, an off-stage presence in Lorca, was present on the Littleton stage, embodied in a balletic non-speaking form by James McHugh attired in a white vest (a nod to Marlon Brando’s iconic performance as Stanely Kowalski?). Alice Birch, best known for her work on television series Normal People and Succession, was credited with producing a play-text “after Federico García Lorca.” The liberal use of the f-word aide, dialogue and narrative didn’t depart as substantially from the original play-text as such an idiosyncratic nomenclature might intimate. The names of the five daughters – each of which are charged with meaning in the original Castilian Spanish – went untranslated, whilst an interpolated reference to a prophecy was indicative of the production privileging politics over poetics.

Freknall spoke in interviews about first encountering Lorca’s play-text in her A-Level drama course, where it was chosen to be performed because there were more girls than boys in the class. Given that Freknall and Birch, both born in 1986, are in the same age bracket as Bernarda’s daughters, it is perhaps surprising that more was not made of their different characters. The matriarch’s single-handed dominance over the house and the play is such that I often forget that she has less lines than we might assume. Walter’s near-constant on-stage presence further emphasised such protagonist status, and almost sabotaged the production during previews when the star seemed far-less rehearsed than the rest of the cast – it wasn’t always self-evident if constant hand gesturing was indicative of the nervousness of the character or the actresses In many productions, the maid Poncia steals the show with her caustic humour, but it was indicative that something was not right in the National that the biggest laugh came when Walter picked up a Chekhovian rifle that had been on stage since the outset to shoot Pepe el Romano on discovering he has been two-timing Angustias with her younger daughter, Adela. The audience had little trouble following scenes such as the one in which this Bernarda recited her signature line (“a daughter who disobeys is no longer a daughter”) where there was a clear diametrical opposition between the different forces at play. Elsewhere, they struggled. Overlapping dialogue as the action moved from one room to another did not aid narrative comprehensibility and neither did a score by composer Isobel Waller-Bridge. The music didn’t always chime with the emotional timbre of specific scenes.

An adventurous acoustic approach similarly underpinned the vision of Alfredo Sanzol, artistic director of the Madrid-based Centro Dramático Nacional. Various Spanish critics described, generally in non-flattering terms, the production, which premiered in Madrid in February 2024, as an emo-Bernarda. Dance and music with beats and rhythms that brought to mind the songs of twenty-two-year-old US singer-songwriter Billie Eilish combined with jittery dance routines suggest a more radical overhaul than what was in fact the case. The play had not so much been adapted as cut to keep the running time down to just over ninety-minutes. As the curtain raised, the entire cast was dressed in regulation black but, by the end, the five daughters were in white. I wasn’t entirely sure if this was to indicate growing freedom or, rather, that them having been indoors for so long meant they no longer had to make a show of their grief. The former interpretation was reinforced by Blanca Añón’s stage-design: initially characterised by symmetrical enclosed lines, it became later a less-claustrophobic space in which the walls had been removed. If the set initially resembled rooms from the chic but clinical Citizen M hotel chain, a nod to rural tradition was retained through a cobweb curtain, deployed for scene changes, resembling the black lace of a funeral veil. An uneven fusion of tradition with innovation helps explain a lukewarm critical response: the production was too modish for purists, yet too safe for the more adventurous.

Sanzol spoke in press conferences of viewing Bernarda as a victim as well as a perpetrator of the symbolic and physical violence required by the rigid social honour codes enforced within the house. Ana Wagener played her as a woman exhausted by keeping up appearances, depleted by doing patriarchy’s dirty work. Bernarda was depicted as being inhibited by conventional funerary ware she couldn’t wait to remove on returning home. The co-dependent struggle between Bernarda Alba and Poncia is at the heart of the play. Here the opposition between the two women was played out in physical terms: Wagener’s body was as rigid as Inma Nieto’s was flexible, the maid intermittently breaking into dance. On the one hand, the two characters’ respective relationships to the body underlined different class roles and contrasting worldviews. Conversely, one does not need to be a dogged defender of conventional realism to sense that a maid from a poor region dancing with the flexibility of a woman who has had the time and means to do yoga stretched credulity to the extent of jeopardising the audience’s connection with the underlying human drama of Lorca’s work.

The Madrid run was a sell-out, but there were plenty of empty seats in the Romea, a traditional nineteenth-century Italianate theatre in Murcia, where the production had a two-night stand as part of a short regional tour. Spectators were far more formally dressed than is the norm in the capital; watching them take their seats, it was difficult to avoid comparisons with Lorca’s prerogative comments about provincial bourgeoise audiences of his time, who he believed understood a night out at the theatre to be more of a social than an artistic act. Many spectators were visibly bored throughout, a number leaving before the curtain call.

There was sufficient scenic inventiveness to keep me from switching off, but I rarely felt emotionally engaged. The auditorium responded most positively to the showstopping scenes in which Bernarda Alba’s mother, María Josefa, escapes from her quarters and runs amuck. Spectators howled with laughter as the fifty-nine-year-old actress Ester Bellver (only three years older that Wagener in the role of her daughter) raised her nightdress to express her naked buttocks. Even allowing for the pathos in Lorca’s writing, the use of humour in scenes involving an ageing woman with dementia is potentially problematic for twenty-first-century sensibilities. Sanzol’s tactic of underlining as opposed to eschewing physical comedy would have had a better dramatic rationale were it to have been staged after scenes of genuine intensity. If the audience does not require cathartic relief, the result is puerile pantomime.

In spite of obvious differences, the Spanish and British productions of Bernarda Alba bear testament to the fascination Lorca continues to hold over practitioners. The ingenious ideas and strategies employed did not, in either case, coalesce into a satisfying whole. Not only did the productions not cultivate a new or greater understanding of the play, but they left some spectators confused and underwhelmed by what is so often assumed to be Lorca’s most accessible work. If part of the problem is the ease with which the play can purportedly be staged, future practitioners might do well to approach Bernarda Alba aa a challenging classic.