DIRE CTORY O F ACT IN G PIE CE S

INTRODUCTION

Lorca once said that you could judge the health of a nations culture by looking at
the state of its theatre. And for him theatre was a natural extension of poetry: a
poetry that leaps off the printed page, escapes from between the pages of books and
becomes human. It shouts and speaks. It cries and despairs.

For Lorca there was nothing precious about poetry; it was simply part of living. He
once wrote: Poetry is something that just walks along the street.

Because for him it was a part of living, to be deprived of it was a kind of torment;
and to deprive people of the chance of experiencing it was a kind of crime. In an
interview he gave to an English journalist he spoke of his anger at the lack of theatre
that was the norm in Spain outside the capital:

Theatre is almost dead outside Madrid, and the people suffer accordingly, as
they would if they had lost eyes or ears or sense of taste.

He also said, I will always be on the side of those who have nothing. He was a
political writer in the deepest sense, in that the act of writing was part of the struggle
for a better world.

Sometimes, when I think of what is going on in the world, I wonder why am I

writing?
The answer is that one simply has to work. Work and go on working. Work
and help everyone who deserves it. Work even though at times it feels like so
much wasted effort. Work as a form of protest. For ones impulse has to be to
cry out every day one wakes up and is confronted by misery and injustice of
every kind: I protest! I protest! I protest!

All these concerns came together in Lorcas work for La Barraca, the travelling
theatre he helped to found in the early years of the Republic. They would set up a
simple stage in the town square and perform the great, and then almost completely
neglected, classics of the Spanish theatre - the works of Lope de Vega, Tirso de

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Molina and Caldern.

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His work on this incredibly bold and imaginative precursor of our own small-scale
touring companies had a profound effect on Lorca. Experiencing the impact these
classics made on a mass audience was a source of strength and inspiration; and
working on the texts themselves must surely have deepened his remarkable theatre
writing skills.

Nowhere, I think, are these skills more in evidence than in The House of Bernarda
Alba.

Lorca wrote of it, Ive had to cut a lot of things in this tragedy. I cut out a lot of
facile songs and little rhymes. I want the work to have a severe simplicity. The
dialogue is of an incredible economy and power; its emotional intensity is such that
just reading it in the Spanish is enough to send shivers up the spine. Perhaps even
more remarkable is the immaculate structure that underpins the dialogue; the way
he has imperceptibly telescoped events that would normally have taken a few weeks
without losing that sense of urgency and speed that great tragedy demands.

He wrote it for the very great actress, Margarita Xirgu, with whom he had
collaborated over many years and for whom he wrote so much of his work: Mariana
Pineda, Dona Rosita la Soltera, Blood Wedding, Yerma. If you write for the theatre,
inevitably you are influenced by who you are writing for; there is no question about
the fact that Xirgu must have influenced Lorca and been at least partly responsible
for the amazing range of excellent female parts he wrote for the stage.

Lorca was also a homosexual, who had the misfortune to live in a country where, and
at a time when, male homosexuality was considered deeply shameful. He was denied
the right to express his sexuality openly in his life; denied, too, the right to explore it
or express it openly in his work. It seems very obvious that the grotesquely unjust
and unnecessary suffering he had to endure as a result deepened his own
identification with women denied control over their own bodies and access to their
own sexuality.

In Bernarda Alba this oppression is seen at its most extreme. Lorca warned that the
play should not just be taken as a metaphor; he wrote on the title page: The poet
points out that these three acts are intended to be a photographic documentary.

At first sight, he seems to be presenting us with a very remote and alien world; the
worst mistake we could make, either in watching or presenting it, would be to treat it
as a kind of curiosity, the theatrical equivalent of a tourist trip to an exotic location.

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For all of us have our Bernarda somewhere inside us: our own monstrous tyrant of
conformity and shame that inhibits so much of our human and creative impulse.

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Lorca finished the play in the summer of 1936; he read it aloud to friends, as was his
custom, and then left Madrid for his habitual summer vacation in his home town of
Granada. He took the manuscript with him, along with the toy theatre that he took
everywhere on his travels. He was mildly worried about how the play would be
received, and how people would take the fact that it had no men in it. He had written
one of the truly great works of this century; it is oddly endearing to find him worried
about it.

He intended to revise it, but never had the time. Civil war broke out, the fascist
authorities took him away and had him shot. He was 38 years old.

For as Lorca was writing the play an army general called Francisco Franco, with his
head stuffed with dead ideas, was preparing a revolution. Lorca may not have
consciously known it, but he was writing under the shadow of death.

All of us now watching Bernarda Alba watch under a shadow of our own. Authorities
parrot nonsense at us, dazzle us with intellectually void and morally bankrupt talk of
profitability and enterprise. Old and moribund ideas, ideas which should have
died with the 19th century, still haunt us and threaten our environment and our lives,
even if they are dressed up with words like modernisation. We may imagine the
threat to be remote. So did Lorca. Threats have a habit of seeming unreal until it is
too late to avert them. We have to take the play as a warning: we have to learn.

Introduction to this pack

I wrote those words on 15 March 1989 for the programme note for Edinburghs
Royal Lyceum production of my translation of the play. I reproduce them here
without apology: they still seem uncannily true for now, and I would suggest that the
issues they raise provide a good starting point for any discussion of the plays
meaning for todays audience.

What I intend to do in this section of the pack is move the discussion a little further
forward, and in particular to try to place the play more fully in the context of
Lorcas life and times.

I have to confess that I have found the task extraordinarily difficult. Not even the
impressively authoritative initials of the organisation which commissioned me to
write it, nor the excellent examples with which I was supplied, have enabled me to

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write what I intended: something impersonal and authoritative.

Perhaps it is because I am now more used to writing plays than writing about them;
perhaps because Lorca is so extraordinarily passionate and personal a writer that he
demands a personal and deeply emotional response. To try to squeeze his work too
tightly into the conventional straitjacket of themes and essay questions is to inflict
damage upon it.

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So there is nothing definitive about this; it describes an organic process of thought,

and is designed to stimulate the readers own, and perhaps very contradictory,
responses.

I have structured this section of the pack rather like the play itself, in that it begins
on the outside, in the vestibule, so to speak, and then tries gradually to enter deeper
and deeper into the world of the play.

Generally when the play is produced economic constraints mean that all three acts
are performed on the one set. But that is not what Lorca intended. His stage
directions make it clear that he envisaged each act of the play taking place in a
different room. The first act happens in an outer, public room of Bernardas house,
the only room into which acquaintances are allowed, and in each of the two following
acts we move physically and emotionally deeper and deeper into the private interior
of Bernardas house and world, until by the end of the final act we have reached its
heart of silence and of darkness.

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STAGING

Lets begin then on the outside: thinking about what the audience see when they
watch the play.

Lorca never lived to see the play performed. He usually read his plays aloud to his
friends, and then used their reactions as part of his subsequent decision whether to
revise them, offer them to be staged, or put them on one side.

The first public performance of The House of Bernarda Alba took place on 8 March
1945 in the Teatro Avenida in Buenos Aires where it was performed by Margarita
Xirgu and her company. It was, however, another nineteen years before it was
considered safe enough to pass the censors of Francos Spain and be performed in
Madrid on 10 January 1964 at the Teatro Goya.

Perhaps the most celebrated production in English took place in the National
Theatre in the early 1980s. Translated by Robert David Macdonald and directed by
Nuria Espert, it starred Joan Plowright and Glenda Jackson in the leading roles.

I say starred very advisedly, because by the time I saw this production it had
become a star vehicle for its two principals and was running in a West End theatre. I
remember being tremendously disappointed by it; the translation struck me as
florid, and the performances were wooden and unconvincing.

In spite of the beautiful lighting and set, which most effectively conjured up the
interior of an Andalusian house, it had all somehow become something terribly
English. Perhaps this was something to do with its move to the West End; what I saw
looked horribly like some kind of tourist curiosity being performed before an
obedient West End public applauding rather dutifully at the end because the critics
had told them to.

The success of the production, however, inspired Ian Wooldridge, the artistic director
of the Royal Lyceum, to mount a new production in Edinburgh and to commission
me to prepare a new translation.1

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 TH E STAGIN G O F TH E PL AY

A few years before, I had met an elderly man who had worked with Lorca in his
theatre company, La Barraca, and who told me he had been a terribly difficult man
to work with. Incredibly demanding, he told me. His testimony is borne out by
others who had experience of working with Lorca during that time; and, perhaps
more importantly, by the evidence of the play itself.

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The greatest work generally demands the most from its performers, and this play is
no exception.

The difficulties begin with its language. It is astonishingly precise, as if sculpted from
stone: language of extraordinary authority, subtlety and power whose energy is
almost impossible to convey.

Even the most apparently simple phrase can pose extraordinarily complex problems.
Without going into endless detail, Ill confine myself to one very characteristic
example of what is involved.

In Act Two, there is a moment in which La Poncia describes the sexy young man who
arranged for the prostitute to meet the men of the village down in the olive grove.
The Spanish phrase Lorca uses means as slim as a wheat sheaf, and that is (more or
less) how the Penguin version of the play translates it:

The one who arranged it was a boy with green eyes, as tight as a sheaf of
wheat. (p 144)2

On one level, the translation is absolutely accurate. But the problem is that Lorca
was referring to sheaves tied together as they were in the fields of Andaluca,
standing up in the fields, tightly tied at the middle as if by the waist.

That is fine and good to an audience accustomed to seeing wheat sheaves tied in that
fashion. I cant help thinking that for a predominantly urban British audience it
means very little. It conjures up, at best, the kind of wheatsheaf you still sometimes
see portrayed on packets of sliced bread, placed there by the manufacturer to
convince his customers that the highly artificial product they are buying is somehow
authentic and natural. At worst, it conveys the round roly-poly wheat sheaves
created by modern farm machinery - which are fat and ugly and the absolute
antithesis of the effect Lorca was aiming for.

After much heart searching, I translated the phrase:

The boy who hired her was firm and strong and had green eyes.

- which perhaps captures the meaning, and even the music, of the original, but
sacrifices the image.

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Such dilemmas were simplicity itself, however, compared to the problem of staging
the play in the current working conditions of British theatre - which generally allow
only three and a half weeks for rehearsal.

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Theres a very basic difficulty involved in bringing together nine actresses, most of
whom are perfect strangers to each other, and managing to help them create a
convincing portrait of a family group who have been cooped up in the same house for
years and years.

Lorcas plays in general are difficult both for British actors to act and British
audiences to accept because they demand a far greater degree of emotional openness,
and a lack of embarrassment when it comes to expressing passionate feelings, than
we are able to accept in our daily lives.

Added to these problems were tensions between the director and his assistant, and a
rehearsal room so small that the spectators were only a few feet away from the front
of the taped-out stage.

Perhaps, too, in the end its almost impossible to create a sense of the stifling heat of
an Andalusian summer in the spring chill of an evening in Edinburgh.

In the circumstances, the actresses themselves were magnificent; and I remember the
final run through in the rehearsal room being an incredibly powerful and deeply
moving experience.

Anyone involved in the staging of a play will be aware of the difficult transition from
rehearsal room to theatre. A difficult technical rehearsal, one dress rehearsal and one
preview were not enough to enable the cast to recapture the intensity of that final run
in the small rehearsal room in the much larger space of the Lyceum Theatre before
the press night. The critics savaged the performance in terms I do not wish to recall;
the actresses confidence was shattered and in Edinburgh, at least, the play finally
closed three weeks later without ever realising its astonishing power on the stage.

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LORCAS LIFE

5 June 1898 Federico Garca Lorca born in Fuentevaqueros, near Granada.

1909 The family move to Granada.

1914 Lorca enters Granada University to study law, on his fathers

insistence. Lorca had wanted to study music.

1919 Lorca enters the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid.

22 March 1920 Lorcas first play, The Butterflys Evil Spell, opens in Madrid. It
is a catastrophic failure.

1921 Publication of Lorcas first book of poems, Libro de poemas.

1922 The painter, Salvador Dali arrives in Madrid. He and Lorca

become close friends.

1924-5 Lorca completes two more plays: Mariana Pineda and The
Shoemakers Amazing Wife.

1927 Mariana Pineda finally produced. An astonishing success.

1928 Publication of Gypsy Ballads.

1929 Lorcas play, The Love of Don Perlimplin, about to be produced

in Madrid; but the theatre is closed by the dictatorship.

Lorca leaves for New York, where he witnesses the Wall Street
crash.

1930 Lorca returns to Spain via Cuba.

1931 Collapse of the dictatorship: establishment of the Spanish

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Republic.

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1932 Lorca sets up La Barraca theatre company and begins touring

the villages of Spain with productions of plays by Lope de Vega,
Tirso de Molina and Caldern.

1933 Triumphant first production of Blood Wedding.

Hitlers rise to power in Germany.

1933-4 In Argentina, where his work is triumphantly received.

29 December 1934 Opening night of his play Yerma scandalises right-wing and
traditional Catholic opinion.

1935 Successful opening of his play Doa Rosita the Spinster.

1936 Growing political unrest in Spain.

Lorca writes The House of Bernarda Alba.

14 July 1936 Returns to his parents in Granada.

17 July Reads The House of Bernarda Alba to his friends in Granada.

18 July Rebel right-wing uprising led by General Franco marks

beginning of Civil War.

23 July Right-wing rebels take over Granada.

18 August Federico Garca Lorca murdered by fascists.

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THE PLAY

When Lorca was still a boy, there were summers he spent with his family at a small
village called Asquerosa. Across the street lived a woman called Frasquita Alba
Sierra, a domineering woman who had married twice and had a total of seven
children from the two marriages.

Lorcas cousins also lived across the street from him, next door to this womans
house. They shared a well with her at the back of their houses; much of what went on
in the Alba household could be heard quite clearly, and was passed on to the Lorcas -
and in particular to the fascinated young Federico.

It is very clear that this household, with its domineering mother, its many daughters,
their clashes with their mother over her authority, and their disputes about who
eventually would inherit the family property, was the seed that, once planted in
Federicos imagination as a boy, was finally to grow into The House of Bernarda Alba
- that utterly extraordinary creation of the last months of his life.

The resemblance between the Frasquita Alba of the village and the Bernarda Alba of
the play was so close and so striking that it horrified Lorcas mother; she begged him
to change Bernardas name so as not to offend the surviving members of Frasquitas
family.

Lorca never lived to see the play performed, and so we can only speculate as to
whether he would have agreed to his mothers request. In any case, he took from his
early memories of this village and its surroundings much more than the name and
basic characteristics of this one household. The whole action of the play is rooted in
the rural surroundings in which he grew up.

In an early draft of the play, he described its setting as an Andalusian village on arid
land.3 This description precisely fits Asquerosa; and in many other respects the
village of the play corresponds very closely to the village he knew as a child.
Asquerosa in Spanish means disgusting, loathsome and in certain respects, at
least, this seems to have been a place that lived up to its name. 4

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It was rife with gossip and with an utterly obsessive and often deeply damaging
fascination with other peoples lives; a place with a poisonous atmosphere,
beautifully summed up by Bernarda herself where she calls it

this damned town without a river, this town of wells! Where you always drink
the water fearing that its poisoned! (p 125)

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T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

Many other details of life as portrayed in the play are authentic to the village: the
incredibly long periods of mourning, the repressive sexual morality, the appalling,
crushing heat, the arrival of the reapers in the summer from the hills. Even the
language of the play is said to reflect the inhabitants particular way of speaking.

Many of the characters were based on real people Lorca knew as a child. La Poncia
was a real servant, although she never worked for Frasquita Alba. Bernardas crazy
old grandmother, Mara Josefa was inspired by an aged relative Federico and his
brother used to visit when they were children. The rejected suitor, Enrique Humanes,
and the husband whose wife gets carried off to the olive grove were also people who
existed in flesh and blood.

Adelas green dress (p 131) was inspired by one of Lorcas favourite cousins who also
had a green dress she dearly loved and could on one celebrated family occasion only
show off to the chickens in the back yard because the family was going through a
period of mourning.

No doubt a more patient researcher could investigate many more incidents and
characters in the play and discover many more links between them and Lorcas
experience of life in the villages of Spain. And perhaps this is one of the senses in
which:

The poet advises that these three acts are intended as a photographic
documentary (p 118)

So before we even begin to experience the play we are invited to bear in mind that
what it depicts is actually true: a true record of women in the villages of Spain (p
117). It is important therefore to try to reflect on why Lorca should choose such a
subject, and why so extraordinarily gifted and imaginative a poet should choose such
an apparently un-poetic form.

Some of the answers lie in the events of Lorcas own life, and these provide a fruitful
starting point for an exploration of the play. I suggest this not necessarily because I
believe that any artists work can be explained by reference to his/her biography; it is
simply that Lorcas extraordinary life offers clues which may help us relate more
fully to the play, and more importantly, may help us make the imaginative
connections to our own lives which are an indispensable part of our attempt to reach
an understanding of it.

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 T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

It is certainly striking that Lorca should have returned to these childhood memories
after a life which, as the brief summary I have included indicates, took him far from
his own roots in the Andalusian countryside. He left for Madrid when he was 21;
encountered the vibrant intellectual and artistic life of the capital, had intense
relationships with the film-maker Buuel, the surrealist artist Salvador Dali, and a
dazzling group of young writers and poets.

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In 1928, the extraordinary success of his book of poems The Gypsy Ballads
(Romancero Gitano) made him one of Spains best known poets. By 1929 he was in
New York, and then made a triumphant lecture/recital tour of Cuba and South
America. He was fascinated by surrealism, film-making, painting and jazz. Even
this, the briefest of descriptions, should make it clear that this was an artist and poet
open to influence from all over the globe. It is extraordinary that at the end of his life
he should, in a sense, turn his back on all this and concentrate with an almost
obsessive power and precision on scenes from his own childhood.

This means that this play, perhaps more than many, is steeped in the personal, social
and cultural contexts that helped shape it. To understand it, then, we must make an
imaginative journey back into the writers past; and through that journey make the
connections that help us understand this play in the present.

The play as social documentary

Federico Garca Lorca was born on 5 June 1898. The year was a hugely significant
one in Spanish cultural and political history: it gave its name to a whole generation
of writers who used the events of this year as a rallying cry in efforts to convince the
Spanish people of their countrys deplorable state and the desperate need for re-
evaluation and change.5 They were called the Generation of 98, and they included
Azorn, Baroja and ngel Ganivet.

The historical event that inspired this movement was the disastrous war with the
United States which led to the loss of Cuba, Spains last remaining colony. This
apparently distant event was to have huge repercussions for Lorca. Cuba had been
Spains principal source of sugar; Lorcas father was to be astute enough to plant his
land with sugar beet, and with the aid of a series of successful land purchases, he was
to become one of the richest men in the Fuentevaqueros district. 6

A long-term consequence of this was that Lorca himself never needed to earn his own
living. Theres no question this wealthy background contributed both to the large
volume, and the technical and emotional daring of his work. As it happened, many of
his plays were hugely successful; but the financial security of his position left him
absolutely free to write as he wanted without regard to the demands of the
commercial theatre of his day.7

However, the most immediate consequence for the young Lorca was that this meant

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he spent his childhood as the rich son of the wealthiest landowner of a mainly poor
village.

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Perhaps the best way for us to imagine the impact on Lorcas sensibility is to think of
our own feelings towards the desperately poor of the Third World - or the homeless
that many of us pass each day on the street. The contrast between his wealth and the
poverty of so many of those around him left a deep impression on Lorca, which he
was to express in later life in his autobiographical essay My Village. 8

The plight of one family affected Lorca particularly deeply. One of his friends in the
village was a little girl whose father was a chronically ill day labourer and whose
mother was the exhausted victim of countless pregnancies. The one day on which
Federico was not allowed to visit their home was washing day: the members of this
family had only one set of clothes, and they had to stay inside their house while their
only clothes were being washed and dried. Federico wrote:

When I returned home on those occasions, I would look into the wardrobe,
full of clean, fragrant clothes, and feel dreadfully anxious, with a dead weight
on my heart.

He grew up with a profound sense of indignation at the injustice of this:

No one dares to ask for what he needs. No one dares . . . to demand bread.
And I who say this grew up among these thwarted lives. I protest against this
mistreatment of those who work the land.9

The young man who wrote this protest at the end of his adolescence maintained a
profound anger right to the end of his life. In an interview he gave in 1936, he stated:

As long as there is economic injustice in the world, the world will be unable to
think clearly.10

He continued the interview with a fable to illustrate the difficulties of creating valid
art in a situation of economic injustice:

Two men are walking along a river bank. One of them is rich, the other poor.
One has a full belly and the other fouls the air with his yawns. And the rich
man says: What a lovely little boat out on the water! Look at that lily
blooming on the bank! And the poor man wails: Im hungry, so hungry! Of
course. The day when hunger is eradicated there is going to be the greatest
spiritual explosion the world has ever seen. Im talking like a real socialist,
arent I?

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For Lorca, the art of creating theatre was totally bound up with the process of
creating a better society:

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The idea of art for arts sake is something that would be cruel if it werent,
fortunately, so ridiculous. No decent person believes any longer in all that
nonsense about pure art, art for arts sake. At this dramatic moment in time,
the artist should laugh and cry with his people. We must put down the bouquet
of lilies and bury ourselves up to the waist in mud to help those who are
looking for lilies. For myself, I have a genuine need to communicate with
others. Thats why I knocked at the door of the theatre and why I now devote
all my talents to it.11

When Lorca gave this interview he was finishing The House of Bernarda Alba, and so
we can reasonably assume that it reflects his thoughts about the purpose of theatre
while he was writing the play.

This is the kind of context in which we need to think about Bernardas famously
inhumane words:

The poor are like animals; they seem to be made of other substances. (p 123)

Lorca was clearly passing judgement on the attitudes of a middle class which he
described in the same interview as the worst middle class in Spain 12 - attitudes that
lie at the heart of all class divisions: the sense that those who belong to another class
are less human, less sensitive, do not feel as we do, and so certainly do not feel their
sufferings as we would in their place.

But it would be most untrue to the complexity of the play simply to present it as some
kind of Marxist parable in which the middle class are denounced as wicked and the
poor emerge as class heroes.

Bernardas remark comes immediately after a scene in which the Maid, someone far
lower on the social scale, has refused to help a beggar with equal callousness:

You can get to the street right through that door. Todays leftovers are for me!

(p 122)

In a hierarchical and unjust society, Lorca seems to be suggesting that greed

dehumanises everybody, whatever their social class.

His own attitude to money and the acquisition of wealth can perhaps best be summed

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up in a letter he wrote to his parents describing the offices in Wall Street:

Its the spectacle of all the worlds money in all its splendour, its mad abandon
and its cruelty . . . This is where I have got a clear idea of what a huge mass of
people

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fighting to make money is really like. The truth is that its an international war
with just a thin veneer of courtesy...
We ate breakfast on a thirty-second floor with the head of a bank, a charming
person with a cold and feline side quite English. People came in there after
being paid. They were all counting dollars. Their hands all had the
characteristic tremble that holding money gives them. . . Colin [an
acquaintance] had five dollars in his purse and I three. Despite this he said to
me: Were surrounded by millions and yet the only two decent people here
are you and I.13

Like the head of the Wall Street bank, Bernarda is portrayed as someone whose
animal greed and savagery is only thinly masked by a veneer of conventional piety.
She works constantly to increase her material wealth, as her neighbours remarks
reveal (p 156), and her avarice lies at the heart of the suffering she inflicts on herself
and on others.

It is a side of Bernarda that has been cannily perceived by the mad old Mara Josefa
in her little rhyme:

Bernarda, face of a leopard (p 163)14

For Lorca is concerned not simply with the suffering that a wealthy middle class
inflicts on those beneath them on the social scale; he is equally concerned with the
suffering they inflict upon themselves. The thwarted lives he saw in his village are
not simply those of the poor.

We can check this insight out for ourselves by simply walking down any High Street
or shopping centre in a contemporary British city and observing the faces of the
shoppers. The extraordinary wealth the members of our society possess in
comparison with the majority of the inhabitants of the world does not in itself seem
to convey great satisfaction or joy.

Lorca perceived this very clearly: for the comparative wealth possessed by the Alba
family brings them no happiness. Instead, both mother and daughters seem trapped
in a cage of their own making, in which they remain imprisoned by their own fear
and their own sense of class values. This snobbery denies them any slight avenues of
escape - such as marriage to Enrique Humanas for Martirio (p 150). Adela is the
only one with the courage to attempt to break free: and that courage costs her her
life.

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The inspiration of nature and the speech of the countryside

In The House of Bernarda Alba, Lorca paints a bleak picture of rural life. But there
are moments in the play when we catch glimpses of a very different view of the
countryside. Lorca suddenly gives us visions of astonishing beauty - of the
countryside as a place where you can look up at the sky and see stars as big as fists
(p 159), where you can see and hear the harvesters come down from the mountains,
full of shouts and joyous energy (p 144) - a natural world of infinite richness and
beauty watched over by blessed saints and the little lights of the fields.

This is actually far more like the world Lorca mostly saw as a child. The love of it
always remained with him, and, as he said himself, the natural world remained a
source of inspiration throughout his life:

I love the countryside. I feel myself linked to it in all my emotions. My oldest

childhood memories have the flavour of the earth. The meadows, the fields,
have done wonders for me. The wild animals of the countryside, the livestock,
the people living on the land, all these have a fascination very few people grasp.
I recall them now exactly as I knew them in my childhood.15

A still more important source of inspiration was the speech of the villagers:

My whole childhood was centred on the village. Shepherds, fields, sky,

solitude. Total simplicity. Im often surprised when people think that the things
in my work are daring improvisations of my own, a poets audacities. Not at
all. Theyre authentic details, and seem strange to a lot of people because its
not often that we approach life in such a simple, straightforward fashion:
looking and listening. Such an easy thing, isnt it? . . . I have a huge storehouse
of childhood recollections in which I can hear the people speaking. This is
poetic memory, and I trust it implicitly.16

This is poetic memory: here we have another key to Lorcas creativity. Its as if he
had in his memory a huge storehouse of snatches of folklore, popular expressions and
popular song: a storehouse he could draw on whenever necessary to produce a
dazzling array of extraordinary imagery.

This is something denied to most of us, growing up in this age, this place, and this
time. The industrial revolution has almost completely erased our folk heritage, and
severed our connections with it. In Scotland, this process was deliberately begun by

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 T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

the destruction of the clan culture following the collapse of the Jacobite rebellion in
1745. In England,

DR AMA 29
T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

where I grew up, the process was less brutal but perhaps more thorough; and folk
culture, if it still lives at all, is mostly preserved in museums or in those festivals in
which middle aged people rather self-consciously dress up as Morris dancers, clog
dancers, or dancers round the maypole.

Because we have never known it, it is hard for us to appreciate what this folk culture
meant, or even measure exactly what it is we have lost. Gibson expresses it
beautifully:

Lorca inherited all the vigour of a speech that springs from the earth and
expresses itself with extraordinary spontaneity. Indeed, one has only to hear
the inhabitants of the Vega talk and observe their colourful use of imagery to
realise that the metaphorical language of Lorcas theatre and poetry, which
seems . . . so original, is rooted in an ancient, collective awareness of nature in
which all things - trees, horses, mountains, the moon and the sun, rivers,
flowers, human beings - are closely related and interdependent. 17

We are fortunate in Scotland in that to a certain extent spoken Scots still retains
some of its vivid capacity for metaphor, its sense of shared culture, its vibrant energy
and sense of utter delight in the richness of the spoken word - characteristics that
have been beautifully exploited in plays like Tony Ropers The Steamie or Liz
Lochheads Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off.

To get a proper sense of Lorcas work, it is most important to reflect on this linguistic
richness (which rarely, if ever, comes across in translation), and particularly to
reflect on the way in which we all employ and enjoy the use of metaphors - black
affronted, you tube, or a load of mince.

It is sad but necessary to add, though, that this is all pretty poor stuff compared to
the immense linguistic richness Lorca had at his disposal, and which shines through
all his poetry and his plays.

In a celebrated lecture Lorca gave on imagery in the 17th century poet Gngora 18, he
spoke of the connections between this poets supposedly highly artificial and obscure
use of imagery and the completely spontaneous and unaffected use of imagery of the
people of Andaluca. For instance, where he came from, Lorca explained, when
people want to describe water flowing strongly and slowly along a deep irrigation
channel they talk of the ox of the water - a surprising and beautiful image that
encapsulates the waters slowness, strength, and even the visual impression of the

DR AMA 30
 T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

water patterns made as you wade through it. Similarly, when one of his cousins was
teaching him how to boil eggs, she told him to put the eggs in the water when it
starts to laugh.

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T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

This gives us the key to another way in which we must start to consider the play. We
have already discussed the ways in which it can be seen as a documentary, a social
document denouncing middle-class values and the profoundly destructive effects of
social injustice. We must now start to think of another dimension of meaning: of the
ways in which the play functions as a metaphor.

The plays religious dimension

When Lorca was a child, he was fascinated by the village church, and by its (still
semi-pagan) festivals - one of which was the starting point for his earlier tragedy
Yerma.19 Behind the church altar was a smiling image of the Virgin of Good Love (La
Virgen del Buen Amor):

When the organ started up my soul was in ecstasy and I fixed my eyes
tenderly on the child Jesus and the Virgin of Good Love, always loving and a
little silly with her tin crown, stars and spangles. When the organ started up,
the smoke of the incense and the tinkling of the little bells excited me, and I
would become terrified of sins which no longer concern me. 20

His fascination with religion spilled over into the games Lorca used to play at home.
A childhood friend remembered how he created a little shrine to the Virgin in the
back yard of his house, decorated it with flowers from the garden, dressed up in a
variety of finery from the dressing-up box in the attic and pretended to say mass to
family and friends with the most profound conviction. The climax of the service was
his sermon: and he insisted that everyone cried.21

Lorca retained a profound concern with religion throughout his life, though as he
grew older he came to detest many aspects of the Catholic church, a rage that was to
attain magnificent expression in the poem Cry to Rome. This is an amazing
denunciation not only of the savage cruelty and inhumanity of the capitalist system
Lorca saw operating in New York, but of the complacency of a Catholic church
which refuses to disengage itself from such corruption and which has, in
consequence, utterly lost touch with its spirituality.

A similar rage informs the church imagery used in Bernarda Alba. The play begins
with a church service, whose bells are heard offstage. But the tinkling of little bells
that aroused the soul of the young Lorca to ecstasy have here been transformed into
a heavy symbol of physical and emotional repression:

DR AMA 32
 T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

My head is bursting with those tolling bells! (p 119)

DR AMA 33
T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

The very first line spoken in the play, then, sets the scene for a kind of distorted
passion play whose central figure, Bernarda, a kind of Virgin of Bad Love, distorts
and destroys the sexuality and life of herself and all around her. She presides over a
house which La Poncia significantly refers to as a convent (p 143) - a convent
dedicated not to the love of God or concern for mankind but to cruelty and
repression masquerading as a kind of sacrilegious piety.22

By this late stage in his career, Lorcas loathing for reactionary elements in the
Catholic church had become reciprocal; following the opening of his play Yerma in
1934, Lorca had come to be viewed as an enemy of the church. Theres no question
that his targets in this play were those same repressive Church authorities enjoying
and abusing a centuries-old position of privilege.

He presents us in Yerma with a world dominated by piety at its most oppressive;

Christ, however, is not altogether from this world. Adela expresses her final act of
rebellion in terms which powerfully remind us of the passion of Christ:

With the whole town against me, branding me with their fiery fingers,
persecuted by people who claim to be decent, and right in front of them I will
put on my crown of thorns, like any mistress of a married man!
(p 166)

This deliberate association of sexual freedom with the figure of Jesus Christ is
something that must continue to shock the conservatively minded. In his own
imagination, perhaps, Lorca is still dressed as a priest, preaching a sermon: a sermon
of human liberation.

Gender issues in the play

It is obvious that his most immediate concern is with the situation of women, trapped
in an odiously repressive set of double standards that expect men to give full rein to
their sexuality but savagely punish any woman who expresses hers. A set of
standards that denies women any kind of control over their own bodies, as
Magdalena angrily remarks:

Not even our eyes belong to us. (p 144)

Like most of us who are trapped in situations which we feel unable to change, the

DR AMA 34
 T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

sisters are mostly resigned to their fate. The eldest has clearly become so alienated
from her own sexuality that she no longer has any sense of what a sexual encounter
might involve. So when she meets Pepe at night at the window - an encounter that in
Spanish literature is always highly sexually charged - what happens?

DR AMA 35
T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

Nothing. What would he say to me? It was just talk. (p 138)

Martirios thwarted sexuality and the impossibility of her ever attaining happiness
leaves her with no other recourse but to thwart and destroy the happiness of others:

My heart is full of something so vicious I cant keep it from smothering me!

(p 166)

Adela refuses to accept the gradual withering of her human impulses:

I will not get used to it! I cant be locked up! I dont want my body to dry up
like yours! I dont want to waste away and grow old in these rooms. Tomorrow
Ill put on my green dress and go walking down the street. I want to get out! (p
134)

The sad irony of all this is that at the moment of Adelas greatest rebellion all she is
able to conceive of is to exchange one form of control for another:

The shouting in this prison is over! [She seizes her mothers cane and breaks it
in two.] This is what I do with the tyrants rod! Dont take one step more. No
one gives me orders but Pepe! (p 167)

Lorca has a profound insight into the damage inflicted by oppression - damage
suffered by both victim and oppressor.

The extraordinary figure of Bernarda herself almost defies analysis. Banal as it may
seem, Mrs Thatcher irresistibly springs to mind. In both instances, we can see a
woman who in order to survive the destructive pressures of a mans world, has had
to become twice as hard and determined and ruthless as any man.

The most deadly form of repression comes from those who have had to repress
themselves; beneath all the antagonism between them, there is a current of sad
tenderness between Adela and Bernarda which suggests that once she was as fierce
and as rebellious as her youngest daughter.

The whole issue of the plays portrayal of the situation of women opens up a
profoundly important avenue of exploration into the play, and relates it very closely
to the other two plays in Lorcas so-called trilogy: Blood Wedding23 and Yerma.

DR AMA 36
 T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

The central characters of these three plays are all women whose sexuality is denied
them, women trapped in a repressive society which denies them the possibility of life
itself.

DR AMA 37
T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

If we are to understand this fully, we must again try to put it into the context of
Lorcas own life and experience.

By all accounts he was in some respects a very solitary child. Long periods of ill
health kept him in isolation from other children; and besides he suffered from a
slight deformity. He had extremely flat feet, and one leg was slightly shorter than the
other which meant he walked with a very characteristic sway.

Like many a lonely child, he took refuge in the richness of his imagination;
something all the more important to him as he grew older and attended secondary
school where he was bullied and ridiculed by some of his more brutal classmates.
They said he was effeminate and gave him the nickname of Federica.

As he grew older, his inner isolation was deepened by the realisation of his homo-
sexuality; and this led to a profound inner anguish which it is important we make the
imaginative effort to understand.

The machismo of Spanish culture has been traditionally associated with a deep
loathing of homosexuality which has only recently begun to dissipate. Even as
recently as 1971, I remember a male friend in Granada telling me that, To be
homosexual is the greatest misfortune that can befall a man.

In the far more traditional Spain of the twenties and thirties Lorcas sexuality was a
source of profound shame, a secret he of necessity had to conceal from his parents
and from everyone except his most intimate friends.

It is important to take a moment to reflect on what this means: not as an abstraction,

but as an experience lived through in the imagination.

It means that when he felt attracted to someone, he was not able to reach out and
touch them; not able to express tenderness or affection; not able to put his arm
round someone in the street, not able to kiss them. It means feeling obliged to deny
the deepest impulses of body and heart: obliged both to deny and to repress them.

It means every sexual encounter has to happen in secret and runs the risk of
exposure and betrayal.

In short, it means being denied the most fundamental of human freedoms. And these
are the very same freedoms denied the women in this play.

DR AMA 38
 T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

So in the play Lorca is making a statement about the situation of women suffering
repression; and it is also important we find the connections between their situation
and that of the homosexual suffering repression in a homophobic society. And
perhaps we also

DR AMA 39
T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

need to reflect on the way boys in general are brought up in our own culture and our
own time: in the denial of spontaneity and the denial of tenderness.

The play continually offers us glimpses of men in the outside world - men whose lives
apparently seem so rich and free compared to the thwarted lives of the women. But if
we reflect for a moment on these lives - as they swap dirty jokes on the patio, keep
birds in little cages, or queue up to pay to screw the woman in the sequinned dress -
it is hard to avoid the impression of sad lives also denied the full expression of their
potential.

In this play men may be absent from the stage, but they are not absent from its
concerns. The forces that repress women repress the whole of humanity.

Lorca as dramatist

What Lorca seems to have achieved, then, is to take a very specific set of personal
circumstances, rooted in his experiences as a boy in rural Andaluca, and create out
of them a potent dramatic symbol both of his own situation as a homosexual and of
our situation as men and women in a time of profound change.

We need now to consider how this was achieved; we need to think about Lorcas
development as a dramatist.

We have already seen how, like almost any other child, at a very early age Lorca was
passionately involved in games of make-believe. His first experience of theatre, as
one might expect, left a profound impression on him. A childhood friend recalls what
happened when a travelling puppet show arrived at his village:

Federico was returning from the chapel when he saw the actors putting up the
little theatre in the square. He refused to leave the square or eat supper. After
the show he returned home tremendously worked up. And next day a puppet
theatre took the place of the altar on the garden wall. 24

His first puppets were made of cardboard and rags; soon afterwards his mother
returned from a trip to Granada with a real puppet theatre she had bought at the
best toyshop in town. So Federico stopped preaching make-believe sermons and took
to producing puppet shows instead. It was a habit he kept up. Indeed, it is said of
Lorca that he kept this puppet theatre with him for the rest of his life, and took it

DR AMA 40
 T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

with him wherever he went.

DR AMA 41
T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

This then is the primary source of his dramatic technique: a childs delight in the
manipulation of puppets on a stage. Strange as it may seem to suggest it in this
context, it is worth remembering that this is a delight that is open to all of us. The
domineering Bernarda, the rebellious Adela, the unloved and embittered Martirio:
these are all within us. Like Lorca as a boy, we can all make puppets out of scraps
and use them as a means to discover these characters within ourselves.

The puppet tradition tends to be denigrated in our culture - it is associated with

children, and so it suffers from a peculiarly British dislike of children and
disparagement of childish things. But it is an art capable of great subtlety and
power; and it is tempting to consider the characters of this play - these extraordinary
larger-than-life figures, strangely dark and terrifying, and casting huge shadows on
whitewashed walls - as extensions of characters for a puppet play.

When Lorca was grown up and living in Madrid, puppets still exerted their spell on
him and formed the basis of his early plays.25 This was one crucial source of his
dramatic technique. The other was his experience as director of La Barraca, the
travelling theatre company funded by the Republic whose purpose was to tour the
villages and marketplaces of rural Spain and perform the classical works of the
Spanish theatre.

This extraordinary pioneering venture made several successful tours of the Spanish
countryside - often playing in towns and villages where theatre had not been seen for
centuries. Lorca chose the plays, designed the sets, directed and on occasions acted in
them.

The success of La Barraca confirmed and strengthened Lorcas passionate belief in

theatres ability to reach out to and communicate with everybody, no matter what
their level of education or social class, and in its capacity profoundly to change those
who experienced it.

It was also, for him, a training ground in which he perfected all the technical skills he
needed for the theatre. This technical command, in its turn, enabled him to master a
form that was to allow him to find his true voice as a poet.

It is difficult enough as a man to grow up and learn to value yourself as a human

being in a repressive society which despises you; for Lorca the problem was
complicated by his vocation as a poet.

DR AMA 42
 T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

Real poetry can only be created on the basis of truth. For Lorca, the truth about
himself could not be revealed. To speak publicly of his homosexuality was to court
disaster: to create a situation in which his poetry simply could not be heard.

DR AMA 43
T HE PL AYS S O URCE S

For any poet who knows that if he is to communicate at all he needs to conceal a
crucial part of himself is caught in an agonising dilemma. It is no coincidence that
time and time again Lorcas voice should emerge as a crucial theme in his poetry:
nor that he should have turned with such immense energy and relief to drama.

The creation of a character for the stage involves becoming the character in your
imagination; and, so often (and I speak from experience), writing drama allows
expression for what is otherwise forbidden. Lorcas homosexuality could never be
openly expressed in his life; but the dilemmas and the suffering to which it exposed
him could be channelled into the creation of the women in his plays.

The play was never staged during his lifetime. Lorca wrote it at a time when the
crisis of the Spanish republic was at its height. The tensions between Left and Right
had reached a point where political dialogue was no longer possible: and the Right
had recourse to force. The assassination of a prominent member of the anti-fascist
militia, and the revenge killing of a prominent right-wing politician, both took place
on the same night that Lorca read the play aloud to his friends in Madrid. 26 Alarmed
at the growing violence in the capital, Lorca left for Granada the following day.

It is as if the impulse that led him to return imaginatively to his childhood in his
work now impelled him literally to go back there in this moment of political crisis.

It proved to be a fatal mistake. He arrived in Granada on 14 July 1936; was captured

by Fascist militias in the early, chaotic days of the Francoist uprising, and was shot
on 18 August. The following day one of the thugs who shot him was doing the rounds
of the Granada bars, boasting he had shot Lorca and that, for good measure, he had
given him two bullets into his arse for being queer. 27

In the play, Adelas death occurs because she dares as best she can to defy the
repressive code that surrounds her; her creator was killed for his defiance of these
same values. In Francos Spain, the true facts of Lorcas death were buried in silence
for many years. This, too, seems eerily prefigured in Bernardas last words in the
play, both denying her daughters sexuality and the manner of her death in a chilling
call for silence:

The youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba has died a virgin. Did you hear me?
Silence! Silence, I said! Silence! (p 169)

DR AMA 44
FURTHER READING

I am assuming that the reader, like myself, is short of time and is not likely to be
impressed by a show of erudition. So I have confined myself to books that are
readable, and easily available in English.

The translation I have used here is by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata,
published in

Federico Garca Lorca, Three Plays, Penguin

I cannot recommend it with much enthusiasm; I have used it because it is widely

available.

My own translation of The House of Bernarda Alba can be obtained from me at the
Drama Department, Queen Margaret College, Clermiston Terrace, Edinburgh EH12
8TS for 5 + a stamped A4 envelope.

Much better translations of Yerma and Blood Wedding are by David Johnston, both
published by Hodder and Stoughton.

A good conventional academic introduction to Lorcas theatre is:

Gwynne Edwards, The Theatre Beneath the Sand, Marion Boyars 1987

An absolutely indispensable biography of Lorca is:

Ian Gibson, Federico Garca Lorca: A Life, Faber and Faber 1989

Lorcas poetry is available in:

Federico Garca Lorca, Selected Poems, Penguin 1997

This is a substantial selection with English translations facing Lorcas original

Spanish versions. It gives a good idea of Lorcas development, his range, and his

DR AMA 45
intensity.

DR AMA 46
 RE FE RE NCE S

NOTES

1 By a strange coincidence, I was also commissioned by the National Theatre to

translate and adapt another Spanish classic - La Celestina - for the same creative
team. Nuria Espert, in particular, was a total inspiration to work with, and I
would not wish my disappointment with that production to sum up my impression
of her as a director. The production of La Celestina was eventually cancelled
because it was scheduled to take place immediately after the death of Joan
Plowrights husband (Sir Lawrence Olivier).

2 All page references are to the Penguin edition of the play.

3 This, and the other details of Lorcas childhood reflected in this play, are to be
found in Ian Gibson, Federico Garca Lorca: A Life, Faber and Faber, pp 435ss.
Lorcas brother Francisco has written a tender and moving memoir of their
childhood together: Garca Lorca, Francisco, Federico and his World.

4 Perhaps unsurprisingly, its name has subsequently been changed to the far less
offensive Valderrubio.

5 A good account of the significance of this generation of writers can be found in

Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: The Theatre Beneath the Sand, London 1980, p 12

6 See Gibson, p 10

7 As was generally the case in Spain at this time, these were stifling and deadening.
See Gwynne Edwards, p 22.

8 See Gibson, p 18

9 Quoted in Gibson, p 19

10 Gibson, p 431

11 Gibson, p 439

12 Gibson, p 439

13 Gibson, p 250

14 Bernarda, cara de leoparda. In Spanish, the words rhyme.

DR AMA 47
15 Gibson, p 22

DR AMA 48
 RE FE RE NCE S

16 Gibson, p 23

17 Gibson, p 23

18 Unfortunately not available in English. See Lorcas Obras Completas, I p 1039.

19 Translated by David Johnston, Yerma, Hodder and Stoughton.

20 Gibson, p 15

21 Gibson, pp 15-16

22 In this context, the names of the characters are important. Angustias means
anguish - and specifically the anguish felt by Mary at the foot of the cross.
Magdalena is a reference to Mary Magdalene; Martirio means martyrdom.

23 Like Yerma, Blood Wedding is available in the same volume as the Penguin
translation of The House of Bernarda Alba. A far better translation, however, is
that by David Johnston, published by Hodder and Stoughton.

24 Gibson, p 18

25 See Gwynne Edwards, pp 27ss

26 Gibson, p 442

27 Gibson, p 468

DR AMA 49
 Part Two
Learning and teaching guide
to the play

Frances Patterson
SECTION A

ACT I
(pages 119-136)

Why would Act I be important in any production of the

play?

The title of the play The House of Bernarda Alba suggests the colour white.
Alba is an old Spanish word for white, and immediately we are introduced to
a paradox. Bernarda is clearly not white. The reference also contains an
implicit scriptural overtone: the allusion is to hypocrisy and whitewashed
tombs, suggesting that we are studying a play of paradox which is shot
through with references to religion.

It sets the scene - Bernardas house

The title of the play suggests the special relevance of Bernardas house.

Lorcas stage directions state:

It is a very white inner room
He mentions thick walls
He suggests when the curtain rises the stage is empty.

All of this draws our attention to the setting.

The other relevant direction here is that Church bells are tolling - the implication is
death, before anyone says a word.
Lorca also stated that the three acts of the play are intended to be a photographic
documentary.

It gives background to the action

Poncia and the Maid in the first scene inform us of:

the death of Bernardas second husband
 the familys position in the village
Bernardas own character
the people in the family and their situation
abuse which has taken place of the Maid by Antonio Maria Benavides
(Bernardas late husband).
Character development and relationship

Bernarda
shows her domineering attitude
shows her superiority and arrogance
shows that she is disliked strongly by the women of the village
shows her preoccupation with cleanliness (Alba = white)
(The litany for her dead husband) shows that for Bernarda, formalised religion
has little to do with Christianity. (Paradox.)
shows her dominance over the girls
shows her interest in and fascination with sex, but her disapproval of it.
(Hypocrisy.)

The girls
At first they are almost indistinguishable from each other - Black Brides.
(Paradox.)
shows the place of the girls in the establishment:
AMELIA, the most submissive and fearful
MARTIRIO, the one who conforms, who is ill - the martyr
MAGDALENA, the most down to earth
ANGUSTIAS, the oldest, who will inherit
ADELA, the nonconformist
shows the alliances between the girls:
AMELIA and MARTIRIO
MAGDALENA and ADELA
shows that Angustias is the odd one out - different father yet she inherits from the
man who is not her father
introduces Bernardas abuse of the girls and the shocking fact that she is
prepared to cane Angustias who is 39. (This marks the start of her irrational
behaviour.)

La Poncia
shows the ambivalence in La Poncias relationship with Bernarda. Is she servant,
advisor, equal, bringer of gossip? She is pleasant to Bernardas face, but scathing
behind her back. (Hypocrisy?)
establishes La Poncia and the Maid as commentators on the action, almost with
the same role as a Greek chorus
shows La Poncia as being a reliable guide to the action
she is a person who gives us information and tells the audience what is happening
 outside the walls of the house
shows us what a salacious gossip Bernarda is.
Introduces central themes of the play

It introduces the conflict between vitality and life, and repression and death
seen in Bernardas attitude to the girls and her lack of respect for them
she has locked up her mother
seen in the role of women - Bernarda tells the girls to sew their trousseaux but
they are preparing for something that will never happen, the girls being locked up
after Bernarda has imposed on them eight years of mourning
the girls interest in men and Bernardas bid to suppress it
the notion that men and marriage are the only way out, but the girls all fear it
except Adela.

It introduces the theme of imprisonment and escape

seen by Maria Josefa
seen by Adela (green dress)
seen by Amelias terror of being caught doing what she shouldnt
seen by Angustias marriage to Pepe
the story of Adelaida as told by Martirio.

It introduces Maria Josefa and madness

Does madness speak truth?
She accurately predicts that none of the girls will be married.
She comments that men around here run away from women.
She comments that men and happiness are synonymous.
She constantly tries to escape.
She is locked up.

Why might Act I be important in your production of the

play?

As a director, how important do you feel the set to be? Where will you set the
play? What colours will you use? Will you use Lorcas own advice that the play
was intended to be a photographic documentary? If so, how will you establish
this? What type of staging will you use? Why?
As a director, how would you establish the mood you want to create?
As a director, do you feel it important for the audience to be aware of the political
and religious background against which the play was set? If so, how would you
make the audience aware of this?
 Which directorial concepts will you introduce? What are they? (The ritual of
life.)
As a director, how do you feel Bernarda should be played? Is she a stereotype, or
is she a very complicated character?
Who are the other key characters in the play and how should they be acted?
Who holds the power? Does it ever shift?
Notes

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ACT II
(pages 137-154)

Why would Act II be important in any production of the

play?

The set

It opens on a white inner room in Bernardas house.

There is reference to the oppressive heat, a threatening storm, a lack of fresh air. All
this adds to an overall feeling of oppression. The weather parallels the atmosphere
within the family.

Development of the plot

It shows an increased bickering and bitterness between the girls.

It points out a number of unresolved questions: When did Pepe visit? Did he
only visit Angustias? If he did only visit Angustias, who was about at 4 a.m.?
Why is Adela seemingly unwell?
The bitterness between the girls is centred on marriage, Angustias and Pepe.
The pointers are that a storm is about to erupt in the family. The atmosphere is
electric.
Poncia relieves the tension with a comical and racy account of her courtship by
Evaristo. She holds court to all the girls.
When the rest of the girls go to see the lace man, Poncia confronts Adela, who
scandalises her. (Key point in the play when Poncia realises the depth of Adelas
relationship with Pepe and that its gone too far.)
The men going out to the fields offer a diversion. They are of interest to the girls
who long for a similar freedom to Open your doors and windows/ Ladies who live
in this pueblo.
Martirio and Amelia chat together. It is obvious that Martirio knows what is
going on but that Amelia has shut herself off from what is happening.
Angustias comes in accusing everyone and anyone of having stolen Pepes picture.
 This accentuates her isolation from the rest of the girls.
Bernarda is livid that the neighbours may have heard the argument between the
girls, which takes place in the quiet of the afternoon.
It transpires that Martirio hid the picture in her bed. (The most conformist
daughter shows herself to be the most non-conformist.)
 Bernarda dismisses everyone and Poncia comes on to warn her that something
monstrous is happening here.
Bernarda refuses to listen to Poncias warning. (This is a key point in the play.)
The maid comes on to report the lynching of Libradas daughter, and Martirio
uses the opportunity to taunt Adela. (Balance of power shifts.)
Bernarda leads the girls off to kill Librada as Adela pleads, No, no.

Further illustration of central themes of the play

Act II develops the conflict between vitality and life, and repression and death.
When the men go out to the harvest, the girls liven up when they hear their
singing and the sound of the bells (bells of life in Act II contrasted with bells of
death in Act I).
It accentuates the theme of imprisonment and escape. The liveliness and the
carefree nature of the men lift everyones spirits. The men are free spirits. The
girls are imprisoned, and in their imprisonment bitterness breeds like a cancer.
Like Poncia they are all stuck in this convent now.
Vitality and repression - life and death - are encapsulated in the death of
Libradas daughter and grandchild. Libradas daughter gave a child life out of
wedlock, and to hide her shame from society, she then killed it. When society
discovered her crime, they killed her. (Compare the Biblical reference in John 8 v
1-11 Let those who are innocent throw the first stone and also 18 v 1-19 v 42
Crucify him? Crucify him? which compares with Lorcas Kill her, Kill her!).

Character development and relationships

The girls
In the excessive heat the girls become more cross and irritated with each other.
This mood is even apparent in Amelia.
The girls show a fear of and a fascination with men.
As the act goes on the bitterness becomes more and more obvious.
Adela shocks Poncia with her defiant declaration of love and desire for Pepe.
Angustias shows a temper reminiscent of her mother over the theft of Pepes
picture.
It turns out that conformist Martirio is the culprit, and when Bernarda goes to
beat her daughter, Martirio stops her, showing great strength of will.
Although Martirio passes it off as a prank, nobody is convinced.
Amelia is devastated.
Martirio taunts Adela at the end of the act - the worm has turned.
La Poncia
Her attitude to men is made very clear.
She shows her management of the girls by the way in which she entertains them
with her story of Evaristo. She deflects from the girls nit-picking and innuendo,
and suspecting a problem around Pepe and Angustias, decides to entertain the
girls.
She goes on to probe Adelas feelings to get to the root of the problem, and is
shocked by what she hears. The relationship between Pepe and Adela has
developed more than she realised and she fears the consequences.
She tries to reason with and warn Bernarda but has to be careful of her position
as a servant.
Her observations parallel the thoughts of the audience: the girls have natural
desires; Pepe is attractive to more than Angustias; Bernardas repression is
excessive - she should have let Martirio marry Enrique Humanas; Angustias is
not a suitable wife for Pepe; the reports about the time and duration of Pepes
visits are all over the place and full of contradictions, and there is good reason to
be suspicious of him and his motives.
Poncia is a reliable guide for the audience and she continues to ask the right
questions: When it comes to Martirio, why would she hide the picture? Dont
you think that Pepe would be better off married to Martirio or - yes, to Adela?

Bernarda
Bernardas interruption of the row over Pepes picture is not primarily to sort out
what is wrong, but to silence the girls because the neighbours will hear. It
emphasises her need to control and her hypocrisy. For her, it is essential to
whitewash everything.
She continues to try to beat Martirio and fails. This shows that the seemingly
most conformist girl has a will of her own.
She vows stricter control over the girls, because that is her only answer to the
problem.
Bernarda cant see that Poncia has a concern for the family and that she wants to
live in a decent house. She is suspicious of her and thinks that Poncia only wants
the familys downfall and disgrace.
Is this true, or is Bernarda now developing a persecution complex?
Bernarda is determined to remain blind to what is going on in her own family, but
the minute Libradas daughter is mentioned, both she and Martirio are prepared
to urge the crowd to kill her. (Whitewash again. Hypocrisy, with echoes of the
Biblical allegory.)
Why would Act II be important in your production of the
play?

How would you develop your directorial interpretation at the start of the act?
Would you open on an empty stage? Would you start with a tableau? Why?
What colours would you use? Why?
As a director, how will you create the tension of the threatening storm in terms
of character interaction and weather?
As a director, how will you continue to build the tension and between which
characters?
At what points in the act does the balance of power shift?
As a director, how do you want the sisters to relate to each other? Who is an
outsider? Why? How, as a director, will you show this? Is there more than one
outsider? Explain how, as a director, you would show status between the girls.
What is the relationship between La Poncia and Bernarda and how should it be
portrayed?
Would you show the lynching of Libradas daughter? If so, how would you do it
and would you involve Bernarda and the girls?
The end of Act II can be compared to the end of Act I. Both have emotional
speech (explanations, contrast, repetitions); violent action; and a climax of the two
major themes of vitality and repression.
As a director, would you use repeating shapes, images, props, movement, tableaux
to emphasise this? If not, explain what you would do.
Notes

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ACT III
(pages 154-169)

Why would Act III be important in any production of the

play?

The set

Lorcas stage directions state:

An interior patio of Bernardas house
Four white walls are bathed in blue. Is there any significance in the colour blue?
The curtain rises on total silence
It is night
Act III opens: At centre, a table with an oil lamp where Bernarda and her
daughters are eating. Poncia is serving them. Prudencia is seated at one side. A
normal family meal, or are there ominous parallels with the Last Supper?

Development of plot

Introduces Prudencia. She is important because she represents life outside the
house. The conversation turns to parent/daughter relationships and it emerges
that in Prudencias home, her husband is a hard unrelenting man who doesnt
forgive. This is projected as the norm. Prudencias only comfort is to take
refuge in the church which gives us an indication of the power of the church as an
institution.
The breeding stallion is kicking outside. There are comments made about
Bernardas herd which allude to her girls as well as to her horses. The noisy
intrusion of male sexuality evokes quite a reaction round the table and annoyance
and irritation from Bernarda.
Adela, clearly twitchy, gets up for a glass of water and is told to sit down again.
The conversation moves on to the wedding and there are ominous references to
bad luck, raised first by Prudencia, the visitor. Church bells start tolling. Are
these a warning of the deaths to come?
After Prudencia leaves for church, Adela goes outside for fresh air but is quickly
joined by Amelia and Martirio. The girls are becoming their own warders.
Tension mounts.
 The mood changes slightly as Angustias shares with Bernarda her anxieties over
Pepes lack of attention of her and his seeming preoccupation with other things.
She is told to ignore these thoughts. You shouldnt ask him. Especially after you
are married. Speak if he speaks and look at him if he looks at you. That way you
wont quarrel.
Pepe is not coming tonight and the girls drift off to bed followed by Bernarda,
confident all is now under control.
Left behind, Poncia and the maid comment on the situation in the house.
Barking dogs suggest a visitor.
Adela appears in her night clothes saying she is thirsty. All exit.
Maria Josefa enters into almost total darkness. She wants to escape to the edge of
the sea. She has a lamb in her arms. Martirio comes on and later helps her off.
As in Acts I and II, the movements and passions of the characters are becoming
more and more agitated as this act continues and progresses. There is an electric
confrontation between Adela and Martirio where it is obvious that Adela has been
shadowed. Both confess their desire for Pepe and the width of their estrangement
from each other is alarming. They are now adversaries - no longer sisters.
Bernarda interrupts their confrontation but Adela is now in open revolt and
breaks Bernardas stick, the symbol of her power.
The hullabaloo wakes up Poncia and the other girls. Passions rise as Bernarda
seizes a gun and goes after Pepe while Angustias attacks Adela.
A shot is heard. Martirio announces Thats the end of Pepe el Romano, and,
beside herself, Adela runs off and locks herself away.
When Poncia and Bernarda force open the door, Adela is found hanged.
Bernarda reacts by imposing silence on all. My daughter has died a virgin. To
the end, whitewash and respectability take control.

Further illustration of central themes of the play

Vitality and repression

The stallion kicking outside waiting to be bred with the mares offers a parallel
with Pepes waiting outside for the girls inside, and it underlines the repressed
sexuality of the girls and the vitality of the stallion and of Pepe. That symbol of
vitality, Pepe, is chased away by a gunshot.
The fact that Bernarda controls her girls as she does her mares is underlined.
Poncias pointed remark She has the best herd in this part of the country. Its
too bad prices are down has a definite double entendre.
The girls in Act I ranged themselves together opposite their mother. Ironically by
Act III they are becoming each others warders. Adela is now shadowed by
Martirio; and even Amelia, the nice sister, has been drawn into this.
 At the end of the play, repression and death triumph over life and vitality. Adela
kills herself and in doing so also kills her unborn child and the girls are left to
endure a living death under Bernardas repressive regime. (Paradox.)

Imprisonment and escape

Maria Josefa is the real representation of truth, and is depicted by madness and
oppression. Neither she nor the girls escape. All are left under Bernardas
tryranny.
Pepe escapes the family and his marriage to Angustias.
Adela escapes by killing herself, but for what? Nothing changes. Her death is
futile.

Madness
Despite her madness Maria Josefa speaks true. She states: Everything is very
dark; Martirio face of a martyr; Here there is nothing but black mourning
shawls; You will have white hair, but the neighbours wont come; I love houses,
but houses that are open, and the men are outside sitting on their chairs; Pepe el
Romano is a giant! You all want him, but he is going to devour you.

What is the significance of the lamb, and of Maria Josefas name?

Development of character and relationships

The girls
In a rare moment of togetherness Angustias tries to share with her mother her
anxieties over Pepe. Bernarda however is unable to respond in a motherly
fashion. She is detached and seems unable to relate closely to anyone.
The girls are now suspicious of each other and watch each others every move,
especially Martirio with Adela. Martirio begins to stalk her sister.
Sisterly relations completely break down between Adela and Martirio.
Adela moves into open revolt when she breaks her mothers stick.
Angustias attacks Adela.
If Adela cant have what she wants she takes the law into her own hands and kills
herself, going against the law of men and the law of God.
Martirio is the cause of her sisters death by uttering the fateful line Thats the
end of Pepe el Romano. She betrays her sister.

Prudencia
The introduction of Prudencia in Act III is a device to show what life outside the
House of Bernarda is like. We discover it is not so different. Prudencia has a
difficult overbearing husband, who has rejected his own daughter, and in despair
Prudencia has
turned (prudently) to the church, which offers more control, more men telling her
what to do, more rules, more repression. That is what is understood as the norm of
Christianity - but is it Christianity or an oppressive churchianity?

Bernarda
Bernardas character develops little throughout the three acts of the play. Her first
word in Act I is Silence; her last word in Act III is the same. Bernarda shows an
iron control over the girls, a superficial relationship with her neighbour Prudencia,
and has scant regard for other women in the village. Her ambivalent relationship
with Poncia is a mystery. It is as if the two women need each other, though they have
an obvious dislike of each other. Poncia is Bernardas means of seeing clearly into
the outside world.

Poncia
In Act III Poncia eventually gives up and walks away from the situation she has tried
so hard to do something about. (Compare the religious allegory of Pilate washing his
hands.) Together with the maid, Poncia comments on the situation in the house and
Bernardas attitude to it. She describes Martirio as a well of poison who would
crush the world if it were in her hand. Poncia points out to the audience the
inevitability of disaster, and stresses the importance of balance in the world. They
are women without men. When it comes to that you even forget your own blood.
Her emphasis on sexuality is the key to the play. Women need men, men need
women.

Why would Act III be important in your production of the

play?

How would you open Act III? Do you intend to use Biblical allegory here?
How does this act conclude your overall directorial interpretation of the play?
What message do you want the audience to take away? How do you want them to
feel at the end of the play?
How will you achieve this? (Lorcas insistence that the three acts of the play were
intended to be a photographic documentary. Bernardas imposition of silence.)
As in classical Greek Theatre, the death of Adela takes place off-stage. Would you
keep it like that? If not, what would you do?
How would you portray the ongoing tyranny that the girls will have to endure?
How do you intend to represent the disintegration of the family?
Notes

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General points to consider

The House of Bernarda Alba depicts a dysfunctional family reflecting a

dysfunctional religious and political establishment. Power and abuse are
synonymous and as the story unfolds the abused become the abusers. How would
you show dysfunction in the family?
The names of the girls are all allegorical. Would you intend to make something of
this? If so how?
This is a play about sexuality - repressed sexuality. Do you feel the text speaks for
itself or do you intend to use costume and other means to project this fact to an
audience?
The text is similar to a flamenco dance. It starts slowly and gains in intensity and
passion. Would you use dance at any point in the play?
The use of fans is actually specified in the text. To what extent would you employ
these and how would you direct/choreograph the movement?
The house of Bernarda Alba is synonymous with prison. Bernarda seeks to
repress the vitality of her girls by isolating them from contact with the outside
world. Franco did exactly the same with Spain in the 1930s. How much would
you emphasise this point?
Alba means white. Bernarda whitewashes. She has a fixation with cleanliness.
Cleanliness of her house, herself, her girls, to the point of sterility. She makes
them all sterile, even Adela. How would you communicate this to an audience?
The repression comes from village gossip, class snobbery, the role of women in
society, male attitudes, an over-restrictive morality backed up by the law of God.
Where is the Christianity in it all? This is a play where religion dominates but in
which Christianity is absent. (Paradox.)
Is the play a tragedy, or is it as Lorca suggests, a drama of women in the villages
of Spain? How would this influence your direction?

SECTION B

Acting roles

Bernarda
A very strong female role and probably the most demanding because she is so often
angry. The actress has to be able to portray the subtleties and range of anger in
numerous ways. Bernarda is all powerful and despotic in the household and is
prepared to take advice from nobody. She is convinced that her way is the right way
and will tolerate no argument from others.

This is a part for an able actress and offers huge challenges.

Poncia
A challenging female role, which offers the possibility of using an accent. Poncia is a
foil for Bernarda and is arguably the cleverest character in the play. She is a well
rounded character who uses humour and a full range of emotions. She is wily and
has a subtly different relationship with each of the girls.

A complicated role for an able actress. It is up to the teacher and student to decide
how much of the religious allegory (if any) will be employed when playing the part.

The Maid
A good part offering humorous opportunities. Not nearly so taxing to play as
Bernarda or La Poncia. The maid is a simple soul who loves gossip and knows her
place. She has been mistreated by the family but has no option but to put up with it.

This part offers the opportunity of a delightful cameo. An accent can be employed
and the Maids movements can be quite amusing.

Amelia
A difficult part to play effectively. Amelia is the nice sister, who shows natural
concern for others in the house. She endeavours to blot out the nastiness, and has
relatively few lines to say, but these stand out because they are so much at odds with
the others in the family. Amelias eyes and facial expressions speak volumes. She
ameliorates, and tries to be a peacemaker.
Magdalena
A down-to-earth character, who shows signs of fun. She appears to have been
devoted to her father. Magdalena is now almost a loner in the family, who observes
others and makes some acid comments on events. There is evidence that she and
Adela were close. Her name suggests a tower of strength.

Adela
The rebel who is still young enough to think she can rebel. This is a strong part, and
there is nothing subtle in Adela, so she can be played almost like a spoilt teenager.
She uses a full range of emotions and comes across as someone who knows what she
wants and will get it at any price. She has the cruelty of the young and is quite
brutal to her sister Martirio, who, as the brightest of the girls, has worked out
Adelas secret. Adela means bitter-sweet and this should be evident in the way she
is played.

Martirio
The martyr in the house. The girl who could have been married but her mother
thought he wasnt good enough. Martirio is a very clued-in young lady and becomes
determined that Adela will not have what she was denied. She uses self-
righteousness to defend her position, but this later degenerates into a fierce jealousy.
Martirio is an odd mixture of a weak girl who becomes incredibly strong through
hate. It is suggested in the text that she has a crook-back.

Angustias
Quite arrogant. The oldest of the daughters and the real outsider. She is desperately
insecure and unsure of herself. She has inherited the bulk of the estate. Her name
suggests she is full of anguish. The question is, why?
Recommended acting pieces

Page reference: 119-121 (Act I)

Opening line: MAID: My head is bursting with those tolling bells!
Closing line: PONCIA: Id rather pulverise something else.
Casting: 2 female
Characters: Maid and Poncia
Approximate length: 7 minutes
Comments: A good scene for two actors. It offers the opportunity to use
accent, a number of props and a lot of movement. It is a fast scene which
shows how hard the servants work in the house and how they are (and have
been) mistreated. It sets a mood of resentment, and indicates that there is a
pecking order for the servants. It introduces humour in the midst of a
grieving household.

Page reference: 130-133 (Act I)

Opening line: AMELIA: Have you taken your medicine?
Closing line: MARTIRIO: God help us.
Casting: 3 female
Characters: Amelia, Martirio, Magdalena
Approximate length: 7 minutes
Comments: Introduces three very different daughters of Bernarda. It
shows Amelias concern for Martirio and the closeness between the two
girls. It shows that Martirio is not well. It shows the double standards that
existed between men and women in Spain at that time. It shows that
Martirio was apparently rejected by a suitor, and it shows Amelias
protection of her sister. It introduces Magdalena and shows her teasing of
the two girls. This is a very challenging scene which shows the interaction
between the girls. It offers a glimpse of Amelia and Magdalena at play.
Page reference: 141-143 (Act II)
Opening line: ADELA: Dont look at me any more!
Closing line: PONCIA: Well see about that!
Casting: 2 female
Characters: Adela and Poncia (plus Angustias read in)
Approximate length: 6 minutes
Comments: A good scene for two strong actors. It is a battle of wills
between the older servant and the young girl intent on having her own way.
The power continually shifts between the two. The entrance of Angustias
offers Poncia the opportunity to change mood completely to cover up but
the scene ends in pure venom between the two.

Page reference: 149-152 (Act II)

Opening line: PONCIA: May I speak?
Closing line: BERNARDA: Ive always been able to hold my own.
Casting: 2 female
Characters: Poncia and Bernarda
Approximate length: 8 minutes
Comments: This shows Bernarda at a weak moment, but she soon picks up
and we see another battle of wills. It shows a wide range of tactics used by
the two women and it shows the relationship between Bernarda and her
servant Poncia. It is almost like a fencing match, and both women are
fighting throughout for the upper hand.
Page reference: 165-167 (Act III)
Opening line: MARTIRIO: Adela! Adela!
Closing line: ADELA: Get away!
Casting: 2 female
Characters: Adela and Martirio
Approximate length: 7 minutes
Comments: This is the last battle of wills in the play, and it offers the
opportunity for a lot of movement and also for a spectacular fight. The
atmosphere between the two girls is extremely tense and they are able
to express the full gamut of emotions.