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.