The House Of Bernarda Alba

This show has now closed, click here for a listing of current and future London shows

Play from 5 March 2005 to 30 July 2005

Lyttelton Theatre (National Theatre)
South Bank, London

Better never to lay eyes on a man, never to have seen one. Ever since I was a child, I've been frightened: the look of men, yoking up the oxen, picking up sacks of wheat, calling to each other, their thick voices, their thick boots. Every time I passed, fear of their hands, of their touch. God made me weak and ugly. It's his way of keeping them away.

So pronounces one of five unmarried daughters before her elder sister, being the richest if least attractive of the bunch, is hastily betrothed. The youngest, burning with desire, begins a passionate, clandestine affair with her sister's suitor. She's spied upon by a jealous sibling, with devastating consequences.

"The laughter – black and bitter – is to modern tastes, and is caught deftly in David Hare’s vivid and sardonic new version" The Daily Telegraph

Federico García Lorca's play The House Of Bernarda Alba is presented in a new translation by David Hare. The poet Federico García Lorca was murdered by Franco's supporters on 18 August 1936, just two months after he finished his masterpiece of love, oppression and loathing.

"A few of Davies' cast are awkward - particularly those in cameo roles - but the sisterly sniping and teasing is often beautifully orchestrated... Deborah Findlay is superb as Bernarda's spiteful yet caring housekeeper and Penelope Wilton is richly complex: viciously repressive, occasionally nervous, and with this hidden well of sensuality which you suddenly glimpse as she strides over to the wireless, flicks on some dance music and smiles. It's worth seeing the show for that moment alone." The Independent on Sunday

An emotional knockout... grips, shocks and moves in Howard Davies' powerfully acted production" London Evening Standard

"While Lorca based the plot on an actual Andalucian family, the drama gains force from a political as well as a social dimension. David Hare's new version makes this apparent. But Vicki Mortimer's design - pillared, domed, with coloured glass - is too appealing and too spacious to serve as a cauldron: it looks as much as anything like a faded Eastbourne hotel. And Paule Constable's lighting is too wintry-white to suggest contained heat. When these girls - who never seem inward enough with each other to be sisters - fan themselves, they look affected. For all her marvellous powers of inflection, Wilton sometimes comes on like a headmistress rebuking a dorm of over-boisterous gels." The Observer

"An emotional knockout... House of passion and oppression... Grips, shocks and moves in Howard Davies' powerfully acted production" The London Evening Standard

"The following things are missing from Howard Davies's production: claustrophobia, sexuality, a sense of oppressive heat, and a sense of danger. Federico Garcia Lorca's last play is a peasant tragedy; here, you get a middleclass melodrama... Lorca is like Synge: his language has the blow of poetry and the authenticity of village life; David Hare's solidly colloquial version sounds like a plodding travel guide to a brilliant landscape." The Sunday Times

"Penelope Wilton is excellent as the flinty, perverse and pitiless Bernarda, hunting whip poised to beat her girls. Her greatest source of pleasure is the sexual degradation of others, as long as they are not her family... David Hare's sensuous new version has the odd grating moment... And director Howard Davies's well-acted production is a bit too informal... Still, I was gripped and appalled and relieved to escape into fresh air and freedom." The Mail on Sunday