About "The House of Bernarda Alba"
Skibbereen Theatre Society's 2001 production is 'The House of Bernarda Alba,' an English translation of the original Spanish play, 'La casa de Bernarda Alba', by Federico Garcia Lorca.
The play tells the story of a domineering widow, Bernarda Alba, who harshly suppresses the amorous desires of her five daughters to such an extent that the youngest attempts to defy her, but with tragic consequences. This powerfully-written piece slowly builds to an intensely-dramatic finale that is well worth waiting for. It was written in 1936, the same year the playwright was mysteriously murdered during the Spanish Civil War. 'The House of Bernarda Alba' is one of three tragedies written by Lorca, who packed a lot into his short but colourful life. According to the eminent critic Raymond Williams, his tragedies somewhat reflected the political climate of his native country in the lead-up to the bitter civil war and the repression it brought: Desire is frustrated violently and fatally by social forces. Authority appears to triumph over freedom, society over personal instinct, the social law over the deeper imperatives of nature.
Hearing Bernarda's final words - "Silence! Silence, I said! Silence!" - one cannot help but remember the censorship that would descend upon Spanish liberal thought, and upon Lorca's own work, for several decades (the play was long banned in Spain). 'The House of Bernarda Alba' roundly condemns authoritarianism and the class system which perpetuates it. "The poor are like animals," Bernarda remarks. "They seem to be made of other substances." The central theme of all of Lorca's work is, indeed, desire. All of his characters want something. But the object of desire is invisible, shadowy, like Pepe el Romano in this play. Lorca's characters are unhappy and 'tragic', not because society keeps them from attaining their object or reaching their destination, but because they cannot fully understand what it is they want. |
This message seems especially apt from a playwright whose own sexuality caused him much suffering and whose life was cut short by the advent of political repression. Indeed, 'The House of Bernarda Alba' has often been read as a premonition of the Franco regime.