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Debut performance needs a little more emotion to work
THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA
Pentameters Theatre
FOLLOWING the death of her husband the ageing matriarch Bernarda
Alba imposes a period of strict mourning on her five daughters,
shutting the doors of her estate to the world outside.
The austere family household soon becomes home to emotional
turmoil as the prospect of love and marriage come into conflict
with the rules of Bernarda’s high-society.
Federico García Lorca, executed by the Falangist group
in the early years of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, never saw
this play produced.
His play – part of Lorca’s classic tragic trilogy
Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba –
centres on two strong female characters in Bernarda Alba and
the household’s head maid Poncia.
These two women are the lifeblood of the home – Bernarda
through her rules and Poncia through her hands, high society
and austereness living under the same roof as the worker and
her bawdy emotion. Claire Cordingley as Bernarda brings a steely
glint and a stiff elegance to her puritan character, excelling
throughout.
This is the debut performance of nascent production company
Demeter’s Men, a group of 10 Camden women trained at the
Bridge Theatre Company in Cecil Sharp House.
The play’s notions of religion and gender are never fully
realised by this production – but this will surely improve
with time. For a play about the emotional toll of repression
this production, as it stands, never managed to win over the
audience because it struggles to imbue the events with the very
thing it needs most – emotion.
Until February 25
020 7435 3648 |
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