The House of Bernarda Alba (review)

The House of Bernarda Alba. By Federico Garcia Lorca. Het Nationale Toneel, Stadschouwburg Theatre, Amsterdam. 26 May 2001.

In a strictly historical context, The House of Bernarda Alba is a play about fascism. Its cryptic subtitle, "a drama about women in the villages of Spain," continues to intrigue would-be interpreters. In vigorously jarring Dutch, Holland's Nationale Toneel gives a ringing endorsement to the power of this play and the opportunities it provides actors willing to accede to a director's singular vision.

Chiefly a Shakespearean director, Johan Doesburg is a recognizable name in European theatre. None of the many difficulties present in the text of Bernarda Alba deter him. Lorca's famously intriguing suggestion that 200 mourners dressed in black enter Bernarda's house after her husband's death in act 1, for example, is ignored. Lorca's scenic suggestions regarding the white walls of the house are acknowledged in this production but altered. Scenic designer André Joosten places the action in what resembles a corral with an eight-foot high upstage wall on which the women climb and on top of which they can walk. A ladder is prominently placed against the wall, and an enormous wooden chest in which the mad Maria Josefa sits waiting to get married by the shore of the sea pulls focus upstage left while a series of doors pull focus down right.

All the trappings of minimalist European design are present: the severe lines, the deliberately unbalanced playing area, the harsh lighting, the constrictive clothing of the actors who seem forced to move strictly from the pelvis down. (All of the women except the rebellious Adela are in beautifully tailored suits and skirts complemented with serviceable, Calvinistically sensible character shoes by designer Dorien de Jonge.) But despite the cold postmodern confines of Doesburg's vision, a sexual energy invests the atmosphere with emotional depth, placing Bernarda's daughters in an exceedingly vulnerable position. They are, after all, prisoners.

Reinier Tweebeeke's lighting underscores the plight of the jailed women. It is vividly theatrical in steely blues and greys. Lines of "intelligent" light move ominously across the stage floor while the daughters and the omnipotent Poncia race behind them. Side lighting pours forth from behind the daughters' doors each time they are yanked open and slammed shut with gut-wrenching reverberation. Bernarda herself walks from darkness into dissolving shafts of light and pinspots until only her face and perfectly groomed hair can be seen. The very lines of her face are illuminated and suggest a neurotic mother's unwavering sense of duty rather than tyranny incarnate. In this sense, we are pulled back from interpreting this Bernarda as a personification of Franco, although this notion, too, remains on the periphery. In act 2, as the daughters sit sewing in the sweltering heat, arguing about the virile Pepe for whom all of them lust, Bernarda sits slightly slumped in a chair in the darkness far down right. The literary text keeps her offstage here and we are goaded into imagining Bernarda in more unsympathetic terms, strictly via the comments of the quarreling daughters. Bernarda is a salacious gossipmonger, and she cruelly brandishes her cane with glee. However, Doesburg's decision to place her onstage in the shadows adds a dimension to the play that does not reify the traditional assessment of this character. The placement humanizes Bernarda, and the spectator is forced to reconsider this monumentally contentious woman as a person of conviction with a terribly misplaced sense of duty and honor instead of a mere mask for Franco and the fascists. Theoretically, this is a problematic choice, and a risky one, but one that pays aesthetic dividends.

The deliberate attempt to humanize Bernarda is emphasized at the conclusion of the play after Adela has killed herself and Bernarda demands that the news be spread that her daughter died a virgin. Shouts of "Silence!" burst forth, but before the final proclamation, a significant scenic interpellation occurs. Recalling Helene Weigel...