THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
Opened 7 February, 2017
****

Lights up; enter the four maids of Bernarda’s household. One is in a wheelchair, one is a person of restricted growth, one is deaf and the fourth renders the others’ exchanges in British Sign Language. It’s an instant, direct and effective introduction to the aesthetic and philosophy of co-producer Graeae: to produce work with deaf and disabled actors, putting the status of such folk at the heart of both performance and viewing, thoroughly integrating it rather than bolting on some signing or surtitles.

Jenny Sealey’s production of Lorca’s final play is not only deft in this approach to its staging; it also opens several further dimensions to the play’s thematic preoccupations. Bernarda’s steely resolve to all but immure herself and her five daughters for eight years’ mourning after her husband’s death, and the daughters’ resistance and opposition, is clearly a meditation on the tortuous difficulties of asserting one’s own identity as a woman in such a constricting culture. (It is likely also a metaphor for Lorca’s own experience as a homosexual.) Here, though, the various conditions with which the daughters live foreground difficulties of their own at every moment.

Kathryn Hunter’s peremptory Bernarda treats the deafness of two of her daughters as little more than a logistical problem: when she wishes her own pronouncements to be attended to, she ensures that Adela and Angustias read her lips, and when she wishes to ignore them she simply turns her back, effectively robbing them of communication. Conversely, it makes for an affecting moment of compassion when Hunter’s Bernarda delivers a motherly address to Angustias principally through signing, with only a few words spoken.

Liz Ascroft’s design meshes beautifully with play and theatre alike. On the heptagonal stage of the Exchange’s in-the-round house, the action takes place within a smaller heptagon defined by the seven mix-and-match wooden chairs of the household. (The seventh is presumably to emphasise the absence of the deceased.) The chairs make for a physical assortment, like the family; one consists of two old chairs grafted together – it has an artificial leg, as does daughter Amelia. There is no attempt to render the airless heat of a Spanish high summer; the claustrophobia here is natural and human, and the more palpable for it.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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