En route to see The House of Bernada Alba, I almost ended up going to vespers. There was a church in place of the theatre I had expected. The darkness seemed imbued with a gravity all of its own. Thorny branches were splayed across the sky. Some women in red coats finally pointed the way to the little red weatherboard theatre. Behind the church. Behind the trees. I shivered outside as I anticipated what alchemy might unfold before my eyes. Entering this theatre itself was akin to going into a church. The vaulted ceilings, familiar black setting and white fabrics framing the space hinted at the liminal journey about to unfold. I waited. But the place seemed staid and static.
The House of Bernada Alba was the last play penned by Federico García Lorca before his assassination in 1936. Bernada Alba, poisoned by the constricting social mores of provincial Spanish society, imprisons her daughters in the house. Entombed in the black shrouds of mourning, they are not to venture outside, where they might be contaminated. They run to the window every chance they get. Only windows bring the world inside. The air is thick and murky with unarticulated sexual craving, primordial passions, anger, the will to avenge and budding rage. The play’s premise, that ‘being a woman is the worst possible punishment’, is bitingly executed. Insurrection seems immanent.
Although Lorca himself prefaced the piece with his intention that it function as a photographic document, the text still resonates with his poetic verve, with his black language of flowers. Director Christabel Sved acknowledged the intensities and amplitudes of Lorca’s play when she said in her notes that the playwright ‘gives us snapshots of passion… in the same way that a photograph documents reality but does not, by itself, explain it’.
The production’s rendering of Lorca’s stinging critique of the conventions of Spanish society was problematic because of its translation of what Lorca meant by ‘photographic’. Being an actor’s theatre, it is logical that the focus of the company’s work should be on the actor as principal mechanism for the proliferation of meaning. Yet the multivalent nature of Lorca’s text was not given credence in the production. The pungently realistic acting style deployed by the cast obscured the beauty and potency that might have been evoked.
The negligent focus on projecting realistic psychological portraits of the characters seemed to crudely explain away the passion that is hinted at in the text, and to negate Lorca’s concept of using the documentary frame to invoke but not to analyse. The task of delivering such a complex piece in accordance with the conventions of acting ‘real’ seemed too great a task for the actors. While Dawn Klingberg had undoubtedly good moments as the merciless Bernada, and Kat Stewart (Angustias), Ella Caldwell (Amelia) and Olivia Connolly (Matirio) played their parts with flashes of varicoloured subtlety, as a general rule, every moment was hackneyed, because it was played to the hilt.
This invariably affected the pacing of the piece. The three act structure of Lorca’s piece seemed to crumple under the weightiness and Tragedy (capital added for emphasis) of the delivery of lines. While the textual dynamics between Bernada, her daughters and the draconian codes of their society become heated until combustion, this didn’t graft well onto the stage. The ‘pressure cooker’ woven by Sved failed to materialise. There was a naked confrontation: one daughter’s body inscribed with the tainted ink of sex. A frilly nightgown and a gunshot. A hanged woman. The text is peppered with firecrackers, both aesthetic and conceptual.
Yet we were not given these firecrackers; we were not given adequate entrances into the conceptual plane of the piece. We didn’t question what forces uphold a society where women oppress ‘transgressive’ women for the sake of saving face for all, because men are the ultimate law-makers. A society where to be indoors and watching obsolescence encroach is deemed a more worthy life than the spirited life of the outdoors. We didn’t question the codes of a society where to love and to physically express this love, outside the confines of marriage, is tantamount to writing profanities across the skin in welts. Where women never even know what it is to have a voice. And we should have.
There are energies colluding and juxtaposing that might have been manifest with more complexity in the piece. At best, a night at the theatre is an experience where the spidery veils between the worlds are lifted momentarily, and all the silken consciousnesses in the space are subsumed into each other. This experience of art is the true church. It is without bandaids, without masks. It is the true realisation of the divine. It is the true conversation of humanity. At worst, a night at the theatre is a night dreaming of the world that begins when the flat plane of the play has been peeled away. The House of Bernada Alba dismally failed to make its wor(l)ds round.
The House of Bernada Alba was produced by Melbourne’s Red Stitch Actors Theatre from April 2 – May 4.