La Maison de Bernarda Alba

“In The House of Bernarda Alba, an almost fanatical matriarchy prevails”, comments director Lilo Baur. A play on confinement –of daughters by their mothers, of women by society– in which García Lorca describes the crushing weight of morality, of other people’s gazes, of frustration and thwarted desire. While men are present, they exist only as haunting shadows, symbols of the forbidden. For this play is very much a drama behind closed doors about women, one of very few European plays in which all the characters are women. Because that is what is expected, Bernarda Alba imposes on her daughters eight years of confinement and mourning for their father behind the walls of their home and sees to it that they do not have any contact with men. From then on, the entire play is an evocation of transgression and the means by which desire manages to express itself, with, on the one hand, the guarantee of maintaining tradition, and on the other, a sexuality that finds a way past social strictures. “Denying themselves any pleasure, women ‘beyond reproach’ await the moment of revenge, a revenge they reserve for girls who give birth to illegitimate children, signifying shame, dishonour and exclusion” and then, as their ultimate punishment, stoning, a spectacle of infamy that Bernarda sums up with these words: “let them pay for trampling their honour!” But when Adela, the youngest, kills herself to escape this fate, the life force she embodied does not disappear with her. “I’d like for the audience to say that if [she] came back to life”, continues Lilo Baur, “she would do the same thing: fight for her freedom. I’d like for this end to be as open as possible because the fight isn’t over!”