Five unmarried daughters between the ages of 20 and 39 live in the household of their mother, Bernarda Alba. The household is a cauldron of pent-up sexual passion. After the death of her husband, Bernarda Alba struggles to keep up appearances of a strict sexual morality. However, her house is being white-anted from within and assailed from outside. The eldest daughter, Angustias, who inherits the largest portion of her father’s estate, is courted, with her mother’s consent, by Pepe. Pepe, the only available man on the horizon, is loved by two of the other sisters. Through the windows come menacing whispers of male power - of rape, the birth of an illegitimate child and the villagers’ vengeance upon the mother. The breeding stallion kicks at his stall (metaphorically and literally) and Bernarda’s house is set to tumble.

George Huitker takes a very stark approach to the play. The women are dressed entirely in black with the slightest touch of green in the dress of the youngest, infatuated, daughter, Adela. Music breaks in halfway through the production, giving a portent of doom. Movement is choreographed circles, giving the feeling of a tightening noose. All of these build into a crescendo, which breaks into a dreadful but powerful coda. The lit image of death at the end is dramatically repeated in the heightened shadow thrown against the backdrop and one realises that Radical Theatre Group has released some of the power of Lorca’s text.

The performers manage to convey the hypocrisy of a moral code based on the repression of women. In the end, Bernarda’s morality was a matter of keeping up appearances, no matter the lies and heartbreak involved. However, the cast were less successful in communicating the hot, claustrophobic atmosphere of the house in which the daughters were immured, like the living dead.

This stylish production travels to Wagga Wagga on Sunday to compete in the 40th Festival of Plays at the Riverina Playhouse.

Ann Nugent, The Canberra Times, 1994

*

One of the trilogy which includes Blood Wedding and Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba endeavours to recreate the fevered oppressive atmosphere of a Spanish country town, an atmosphere which reaches an even fiercer intensity in the house in mourning where Bernarda, played by Liz Bradley, tyrannises over her aged mother and her own five daughters. All but cut off from the outside world, but actually conscious of the slow but inexorable passage of time, the women live “like shadows in Love’s strangled stifled throes” and, out of their passion, conveyed in Lorca’s urgent tempestuous language, springs inevitable tragedy.

George Huitker’s production, in stylised black drapes with every member of the cast dressed in plain black, effectively rendered the unbearable weight of a narrow, conventional morality, though it would have been good if some way could also have been found to symbolise the unrelenting heat of summer which recurs again and again through the dialogue, almost as an image of the pressure which nature opposes to human conventions.

The acting was enthusiastic and energetic, if a little unrelenting at times, and the use of recorded music effectively underpinned the dramatic force which was generated at the climactic moments. Lines throughout were delivered with clarity and feeling. and although I sometimes caught myself wondering whether Bernarda could have been presented with a little more light and shade, I suspect the part is just not written in that way, and that the audience, like her daughters, are meant to see her only as the unyielding face of obsessive respectability. There was some slight relief afforded by the greedy and gossipy La Poncia, nicely played by Cathie Clelland, but she too is eventually caught up in the vortex.

All in all this was an evening that lingered in the memory : it seemed a pity that so much good work should have been restricted to such a short season.

Ken Gardiner, MUSE, 1994

*

There was some very good drama. George Huitker’s direction of The House of Bernarda Alba - Radical Theatre Company’s powerful and strong production of matriarchy and suicide - left many of the audience in tears.

John Beard, MUSE, 1994