Director Jake Donald’s impressive translation and production of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, is distinguished by setting the play’s rural, conservative Andalucian town in the even more repressive surroundings of The Cellar. Staging it in the nightclub evokes the play’s darkness: descending the steps to the basement to be greeted with silence and stillness, rather than a reverberating bass line, is arresting. Heavy black speakers frame the stage, acting as the all-important thick walls which incarcerate Bernarda’s daughters in their own home. The back wall is a curtain of black lace, resembling the veil the daughters are forced to wear for the eight years of mourning Bernarda imposes on the household: both wall and veil close them off from the outside world.
Performances are mixed: Alethea Redfern plays Adela with appropriate vivacity as well as a tragic desperation to break out of her mother’s authoritarian regime. Laura Gledhill as Angustias is captivating and eerily timid, but the remaining daughters let the otherwise excellent cast down with disappointingly flat performances. Whilst life in that household would draw the life out of anyone the lines are delivered ritualistically, with so little energy.
Some of the lead roles, however, are outstanding, with Ella Jackson and Camilla Dunhill’s handling of the tense power dynamic between Bernarda and Poncia being of particularly note. As the bridge between the daughters and their tyrannical mother, Dunhill is confident as the omniscient eye of the household, yet jaded by her economic and social submission to Bernarda. Jackson sustains Bernarda’s dictatorial intensity and wilful ignorance brilliantly throughout. However, the stand-out performance is Jessie See as grandmother Maria Josefa, whose unnerving moans permeate the beginning of the play and whose believable madwoman-in-the-attic mania instills palpable terror in the audience.
Visual and sound effects were subtle yet effective, staying true to Lorca’s desire to communicate the injustice of life for women in 1930s rural Spain. The sound of church bells is more like a prophetic funeral toll, and noise of the outside world is brought in just enough to remind the daughters of how unattainable this part of the world is for them, the embroidered flowers on their handkerchiefs representing the closest thing they can get to the freedom of the natural world. The daughters are equally spectral in their black mourning gowns and white nightgowns, and the use of the aisle in the audience breaks the fourth wall to bring the audience inside the prison that is Bernarda’s house. Overall, a chilling reimagining of Lorca’s play, brought to life with emotional intensity and innovative staging.
