Looking out at you from the poster for the National Theatre’s latest version of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, Harriet Walter cuts an imperious figure. Her eyes and fingers direct accusation your way. Passing by leaves you feeling an irrational guilt for an unknown crime.
It’s like the Slaters with Sangria
Casting Dame Harriet as the eponymous cold-hearted and hot-tempered matriarch is an audience-winning coup. Whether it’s Shakespeare or Succession, her performances are always exquisitely watchable.
So, it’s surprising to discover that it’s not Walter’s stage presence that will enthral you here.
While you may go to see Bernarda Alba, you will leave remembering the House.
Rural & tragic
The House of Bernarda Alba is often trilogised with Blood Wedding and Yerma. Sometimes described as rural, sometimes tragic, the plays’ descriptions are more linked than you may think. Each takes place in a claustrophobic village deep in the Spanish countryside. And each shows women being held in place by oppressive heat and aggressive men.
Bernarda Alba’s house is in one such village. Men tend farms. Women stay home. Men want women. Women need men. In Lorca’s Spain, the sun is only one cause of the unbridled heat that leaves the walls dripping with sexual desire.
Senor Alba, whose wake begins the play, is a typical Lorca patriarch. In death, his reputation is untarnished by the knowledge that farmland was not the only place he liked to spread his seed.
Left with the house, and the five daughters and two maids she treats as its contents, Bernarda wears her role as widow like the black dress she will adorn for the self-imposed eight years of mourning. Her displays of grief befit etiquette, not emotion. She replaces love with laws, dishing them out to the surrounding women as harshly as any male oppressor.
The play suggests that while the roots of misogyny may be planted by men, its growth relies on the women who enforce and accept its rules.
A dancing flame
Alba suffocates her daughters with a blanket of ice. She demands order and expects respect. But ice can only last so long in a heat that can spark a fire at any time.
The spark appears in the form of local bad boy, Pepe El Remano. Only referred to in the play, here he is seen as a dancing flame that threatens to engulf the house in his wake.
James McHugh silently salsas across the stage like an extra in Dirty Dancing. He is marrying the eldest but richest daughter Angustias, fucking the youngest and prettiest Adela, and tempting the saddest and ugliest Martirio. His gyrating groin is a match endlessly striking their touchpaper.
McHugh’s appearances stay just on the right side of comical. Languorously writhing like an unseen houseguest, he sweats enough pheromones for those on the front row to consider a pregnancy test when they get home.
His masculinity promises to satiate the hunger of these love-starved women. Any familial loyalty is eroded by selfish desire. And when a man comes between sisters, well…
If you can’t see the writing on the wall, the gun that remains centre stage throughout is its visual portent.
It’s like the Slaters with Sangria.
Breathtaking scale
But it’s the house that commands your attention. Buoyed by her recent creation (with designer Tom Scutt) of Cabaret’s Kit Kat Club, director Rebecca Frecknall (with designer Merie Hensell) has built a house with breathtaking scale.
Revealed from the centre, as though we are peering inside an expanding letter box, the rigid Perspex structure of ten rooms over three floors spans the entire width and the acrophobia-inducing height of the Lyttelton stage. It’s like the set of Celebrity Squares. If the celebrities were giants.
It feels clinical, like they are subjects in a scientific experiment. They have no escape and nowhere to hide.
Alba believes she sees all but we know her understanding is limited. The open house allows us to see her daughters alone in their rooms. They drink. They cry. They eavesdrop. They masturbate. We have watched them watch the world outside. We see them seeing the men. And the man.
Choreographed conversation
The script is written ‘after’ Lorca, by Alice Birch, who wrote the screenplays for Normal People and the film Lady Macbeth. Being ‘after,’ it’s not an adaptation or modernisation. Instead, we have a sprucing of the original with added (ill-fitting, unnecessary) expletives.
Scenes run concurrently for much of the first act. If this were TV, there would be split screens aplenty. On stage, it requires precise timing. When the timing becomes too precise, it turns conversation into choreography.
Lorca’s rhythm is replaced by requirement. Scenes pause unnecessarily so their words can be echoed across other scenes. You can almost hear beats being counted to ensure correct delivery. When timing is dictated by staging, we disengage.
As an exercise, this is an achievement we mentally recognise and respect. But we don’t experience emotions when watching an exercise.
One note characters
Though the set has scale, it also restricts movement. Instead of exiting the stage, actors traverse multiple staircases and corridors to conduct ‘stage business’ in their rooms.
The tightly blocked movement, the need to be ‘on’ when ‘off’, the beat-counting before speaking, all create distance from the audience. With such focus on the physical requirements, the actors rarely connect with each other. Characterisations rely heavily on one note, even if that note is played well.
Isis Hainsworth and Lizzie Annis demonstrate the complex emotional turmoil of Adela and Martirio respectively through a range of screams. (Sometimes the one note grates).
Eliot Salt tries to add depth to her blandly smiling Amelia by giving her a drink problem, seen only when guzzling from a bottle in ‘still on’ moments. Rosalind Eleazor conveys the world-weariness of Angustias by giving a masterclass in eye acting.
Thusitha Jayasundera as the disregarded maid of 39 years, Poncia, shows great comic timing but is left delivering speeches that should be dialogue.
The acting is strong. But the reacting is rarely visible.
What about Walter?
Walter follows Glenda Jackson’s “fearsome tyrant” and the “chilling, iron-fisted” Penelope Wilton, with a stately and quiet Alba. For her, respect is an expectation rather than a demand.
She shows disregard for her daughters more than contempt, treating them like property not people. Any fear must be borne of childhood memory, not from visible present threat.
When she does explode, it is with control. A slap that seems surprising to herself. A punishment that is expected but dully delivered. We don’t fear her presence, just dislike her approach to parenting.
Without this terror, she comes across as a weak bully who needs to be put in place. If we don’t feel it, why should those around her? I found myself surprised that no daughter simply stood up to her. It seemed like a returned slap, or a push would simply leave her disarmed, her power neutered.
Even the gun-firing denouement is done with pause and precision, not passion and anger. A slow walk, a steady aim. A pacing too easy to interrupt.
And an accent that sounds more Yiddish than Spanish. Which is even more out of place when all around her speak with natural English tones.
You’re unlikely to feel as nervous next time you pass the poster.
Flamenco without castanets
Taken as a whole experience, The House of Bernarda Alba is clearly of the quality to be expected of the National Theatre. It has stature and grandeur that makes it visually exciting.
And, thanks to the concurrent scenes, it has a running time of just two hours (excluding interval) so it’s unlikely to bore you.
The house itself really is worth the ticket price alone, and the performances are strong. Even if they aren’t cohesive.
But it lacks the passion and danger associated with Lorca’s work and his life.
It’s like a flamenco without castanets. A paella without mussels. A Rioja without body.
It is Lorca. But it is very much Lorca Lite.
