Spanish homosexual intellectuals (quite a mouthful) certainly do love their women. In recent years, prolific film maker Pedro Almodóvar has delighted audiences with a string of films focusing on the lives of female protagonists, providing an insight into the way women think like no straight man could. If you’ve seen his most recent offering, Volver, for example, you’ll remember how well he captured Penelope Cruz’s character’s awareness of her own breasts as she cleaned a blood-stained-knife at the kitchen sink. Inspired.
With this (the bit about women, not Penelope’s breasts) in mind, a group of us from Merton, relishing any and every opportunity to soak up Oxford’s pseudo-intellectual student theatre scene, set off to see The House of Bernada Alba, a Spanish play with an all female cast by Lorca (another Spanish homosexual – see where I’m going?) performed at the OFS.
Despite having booked the seats a week in advance, we still managed to get that annoying single row of chairs at the top. After much confusion about which side we were meant to be sat on and a brief spat with an irate Spanish woman (we made her move three times, taking the wise decision to send our Northern Irish friend to negotiate with her), we took our seats, leant our right arms over the banister, and watched the play.
However, during the first half, some of us were left increasingly confused. The audience had been laughing. Laughing? Had they never read Lorca? Had they failed to grasp that wonderfully melodramatic tone that gay Spanish writers capture so well? In fairness, some of the characters were played comically, the maid in particuluar with exaggerated mannerisms and a rather out of place Somerset accent. But still, when a menacing old woman who has locked her daughters away to mourn, for eight draining years, a husband she never really loved shouts, ‘Your only right is to obey me!’, the correct response is icy horror, not roaring laughter!
The audience did manage to grasp the chilling tone in the second half, but not until the final scene, in which the sight of one of the daughters hanging herself was met initially with muted chuckles, which died down as the perpetrators realised that they had completely misunderstood the tone of the whole play.
Oh well, at least it made me feel clever.
