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.