‘To be born a woman is the worst punishment in the world,” we are told in Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play, the last of his rural trilogy which follows a house of unmarried women ruled by an iron-willed mother.
Bernarda (Harriet Walter) is an almighty authoritarian, policing her five daughters’ virtue under the guise of protecting them, in a play that has variously represented patriarchal tyranny and the implacably rising forces of totalitarianism in Lorca’s Spain.
In Rebecca Frecknall’s typically refashioned revival, Walter’s Bernarda cuts a ramrod but distant figure, too drowned by grief, it seems, to be truly terrifying. In between her outbursts (they never quite bloom into tirades) and chilling acts of control, including an eye-watering moment with a bowl of boiling water, she throws out soft, anguished looks and shows small passing tenderness.
Playwright Alice Birch (of Succession and Normal People fame) centres the daughters instead, drawing out the fulmination, tension and irascibility between the brood who are raucous here, not cowed by their mother but free, fearless spirits. Their desperate desires and jealousies are depicted vividly, especially when suitor Pepe El Romano (James McHugh, speaking only in dance-like movements) asks for one daughter’s hand in marriage, while exercising his sexual passion with another. Isis Hainsworth, as the youngest, Adela, emanates good angry rebellion fuelled by red hot passion, while Rosalind Eleazar convinces as the eternally unhappy but entitled eldest daughter, Angustias, as does Martirio (Lizzie Annis), the sister eaten up by her jealousy. These young women seem less of Lorca’s world than our own: spirited, uncontainable, even stroppy, and cursing liberally in a particularly jarring quirk of the script (Bernarda does the same).
Merle Hensel’s handsome set is a house sliced open so we see every woman, from daughter to housekeeper to Bernarda’s locked-up elderly mother (Eileen Nicholas, rather too comic, and like the daughters, too free) in their rooms. Every last intimate act lies exposed. It is a clever play on the notion of exposure, from domestic “peeping” to greater political surveillance.
A boldly counterintuitive push against Lorca’s naturalism comes through heavy stylisation. There is airily choreographed movement, half danced; a Chekhovian gun hangs on a central wall to remind us what is to come; and characters enact numerous scenes at once around the house.
The script’s polyphony has two or more conversations sometimes interwoven with each other which sounds musical when it works but is more often distracting, fracturing the focus. When the scenes become unified, they are powerful and intense, such as the hair-raising end of the first act, set in slow motion, when a woman who has had a child out of wedlock is hunted down by villagers – a lesson to Bernarda’s daughters on sexual impropriety. Ironically, the house seems its most potent in furtive silence, with only the clock ticking.
The play was originally set in an Andalucían village and this production sucks away much of the play’s Spanishness, aside from a few fluttering fans gesturing at a sweltering summer. We do not feel the sexual heat inside the household until rather late in the play. Ultimately, the stylised elements smother the play’s intensity. There is great innovation here but the terrible swell of passion, frustration and intensity needed for the play to gain its full and devastating tragedy does not reach a head.
• At the Lyttelton theatre, National Theatre, London, until 6 January
