The House of Bernarda Alba, National Theatre review ★★★★★

A creative dream team of writer Alice Birch ([BLANK]) and director Rebecca Frecknall (A Streetcar Named Desire) turn the stifling home of Federico García Lorca’s familial drama into a sprawling, clinical complex in a production fired by powerful performances and where passive moments paint a backstory for each female character.

Harriet Walter, in a part she seems born to play, stalks the hallways and sucks the zeal out of every room she enters as the titular matriarch Bernarda Alba. Upright, rigid and intensely prickly, she rules over her five daughters with an iron fist, forcing them to live even more repressed lives than they would outside the family home in 1930s Andalucia. Believing no man in the village to be worthy of them, she has no qualms about imposing an eight-year period of holed-up mourning on the family following the death of her husband – father to most of her daughters.


Harriet Walter (Bernarda Alba) in The House of Bernarda Alba at the National Theatre. Photo: Marc Brenner

Meanwhile the daughters, young women in the prime of their lives, have their own hopes and carnal desires. In Birch’s liberal adaptation of the text, their terror-ridden boredom at their impending imprisonment is expressed through as many expletives as tortured sobs and sighs.

In a family of women with as varied personalities as Little Women’s March sisters, or indeed the Bridgertons, Pearl Chanda is superb as the cynical Magdalena, craving men’s freedoms but not their bodies. We feel Lizzie Annis’s yearnings as the overlooked Martirio, and Rosalind Eleazar’s fierce patience as Angustias, for whom a marriage lingers just out of reach. Isis Hainsworth as youngest sister Adela exudes her character’s sexual frustration. When in the arms of James McHugh’s Pepe El Romano, here a dancer with the hench physique of a prize bull, her passion is as vivid as her later despair, which manifests in a guttural outburst.


Eliot Salt (Amelia), Isis Hainsworth (Adela) and Rosalind Eleazar (Angustias) in The House of Bernarda Alba at the National Theatre. Photo: Marc Brenner

Thusitha Jayasundera as pragmatic housekeeper Poncia and Eliot Salt as eye-rolling Amelia are the story's much-needed tension diffusers, reminding us how unhealthy the family dynamic is.

The frigid, teal furnishings of Merle Hensel’s clinical doll’s-house set becomes a visual metaphor for Bernarda putting her family’s life on ice, but the space looks so chilly that lines about the oppressive heat struggle to land. It’s a shame when we know that together, Frecknall and Hensel can conjure the similarly oppressive heat of a sweltering New Orleans. Still, gauze walls allow us to peer into different corners of the home and see what occupies the women when alone in private, be it praying, bathing or masturbating.


The House of Bernarda Alba company at the National Theatre. Photo: Marc Brenner

Lee Curran’s lighting is effective too, illuminating the women as visually striking silhouettes in the opening sequence, and later, casting a hot red aura around an intertwined Adela and Pepe. The latter moment is lent further steaminess by Isobel Waller-Bridge’s score, which ups the lust with raspy, breathy sounds and echoey thudding heartbeats.

It’s tough when watching this poignant play to think that Lorca, murdered during the Spanish Civil War shortly after writing it, never got to see its success on stage. This compelling, worthy revival reminds us why the play still matters.