As the Tamasha company discovered a few years ago with their Pakistani adaptation The House Of Bilquis Bibi, Lorca’s final play can be used to comment on numerous social and political cultures, but actually translating its events into those cultures does not necessarily add very much.
    
Emily Mann’s adaptation, which sets the action in rural Iran at an unidentified period between the play’s composition in 1936 and today, is not radical. It changes the characters’ names (with the exceptions of Bernarda herself and the youngest of her five daughters, Adela), and the oppressive religious sensibility which leads Bernarda to declare eight years of mourning for her deceased husband is now Shia Muslim rather than Spanish Catholic. (It is impressive to see more than two dozen mourners enter in funerary chadors.) But little else of substance changes, and this includes the connotations of the play. The air of segregation about this closed, all-female household may resonate with contemporary Iranian gender policies, but the matriarchy of Bernarda would appear at odds with it.
    
What remains, then, in Bijan Sheibani’s production are a number of fine performances. Shohreh Aghdashloo (best known for her role in the film House Of Sand And Fog) is as poker-backed as the best Bernardas, deploying the stiff-legged gait that results when a walking-stick is used on the same side as the weak leg; she presides over the initial silent mourning session with the quiet tyranny of a female Voldemort. Jane Bertish is excellent as the candid housekeeper Darya (alias La Poncia in the original), and Mia Soteriou has the opening minutes sewn up as an irreverent maid. As for the five daughters of the house, I am afraid that I fell prey to the occasional danger of this play, that it may become difficult to keep track of one from another. To an extent this is built into the plot, with three of the sisters actively pursuing the offstage suitor Parviz Rumani (a.k.a. Pepe el Romano) and the other two similarly fascinated with him though less actively so. It means that when cataclysm finally strikes the household, it seems to come from all directions at once. (Sheibani overdoes the motif by ending each scene with a lightning-flash.) There is more here than in the original, but less more, so to speak, than one might expect.

Written for the Financial Times.