THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Play by Alice Birch, after Federico Garcia Lorca
National Theatre – Lyttleton, South Bank, London SE1 9PX, until January 6, 2024
Lorca’s masterpiece, finished in June 1936 only two months before he was assassinated by the Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, is given a wonderfully lucid and compelling production by Rebecca Frecknall.
Frecknall’s currently the hottest director in town and she’s united with Dame Harriet Walter whose TV performances all get Emmy nominations these days and who is on a similar career high. In Succession she held us gripped as another conniving mother, and one of the writers on that, Alice Birch, has done wonders here with this adaptation. It succeeds in being faithful to Lorca’s command that it “Be realistic, without a drop of poetry” (unlike his other work). At the same time Frecknall and team have made it current, but also drawn out the poetry that is there, in a production with makes great use of movement and visuals.
The story of five sisters forced to live in virginal seclusion under their mother’s tight grip as the mourn their father’s death is often read as a political allegory for Franco’s Spain and a stark critique of the excesses of Roman Catholic piety, but Frecknall and Walter do something wonderful here; they remind us this isn’t about piety it’s about raw power.
This Bernarda curses, privately of course, but she does, as do her daughters. The servants’ gossip too is replete with jokes and insults. Audiences might recoil that the profanity is misplaced but of course everyone trapped in this crazy hothouse would cuss. For piety was always just the convenient cloak to wear for Bernarda. “All that matters is the appearance” as she puts it. Finally liberated from the patriarch she is now free to rule this roost (immediately declaring eight years mourning) and taking sadistic pleasure in doing that. Her first word and last words are cries of “Silence”. It’s her time.
Merle Hensel’s design is arresting. She’s filled the stage with an enormous three floor cross-section of a house and wrought-iron gates extend to the edges to prevent any escape. The daughters’ bedrooms are like nuns’ cells, and it all resembles a dolls house, but one which has a sickly grey-green hue. The walls are transparent, for this is a house for snitching, and Lee Curran’s lighting makes great use of silhouette. Frecknall conducts the overlapping dialogue across three floors masterfully. Lorca’s great insight here was that, as in all tyrannies, the women here are complicit in policing the culture of observation and surveillance that renders them prisoners in the first place. It’s perfectly manifested here.
How cruelty repeats itself across the generations is another theme, and there’s a mad granny in the attic (who keeps escaping) and whose transgressions are mirrored in those of the youngest daughter, Adela (a great Isis Hainsworth), who daringly dons a green dress and dances in ecstasy, if only before the chickens in the yard. Her later erotic trysts with Pepe El Romano (James McHugh) who’s destined to marry her older sister, are pivotal to the plot.
Performances throughout are top class. Walter’s Bernarda is no Disney villain, instead she’s an angry, vengeful soul trapped in repeating cycles of past pain. The adaptation also alludes to the father’s sexual abuse of the oldest stepdaughter. Martirio, destined for spinsterhood (the martyr!) as she walks with a limp, is given great spirit by Lizzie Annis and her fall into collusion is heartbreaking. Thusitha Jayasundera, though, is the stand-out as Poncia, the wily and pragmatic housekeeper and Bernarda’s only confidante. Bernarda doesn’t do friends.
