Dull staging of Lorca

Photo: Jonathan Keenan

Kathryn Hunter in the title role in The house of Bernarda Alba, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA
Royal Exchange, Manchester, to February 25

YOU can’t always get what you want and be in control, poet and playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca suggests here in his final work.

Lorca’s unfortunate timing was to be Spanish, left-leaning, famous and caught up in the national unrest before the Spanish Civil War – which led to his death at the hands of the Fascist dictatorship.

So read Alba as a tale of religion, tradition and honour in rural Spain in the Thirties, or as a parallel of the politics of the day. For “dictator” read the title character, and for “people” read Alba’s daughters, all stifled by overbearing authority.

The play, presented here by the Exchange and Graeae Theatre Company (which uses disabled actors and incorporates their disabilities in the production), opens on the tyrant Alba (the, diminutive, intense and remarkable Kathryn Hunter), convinced she knows all that happens under her roof, and telling her five girls (aged 20 to around 40) her husband’s funeral signals the start of eight years of deep mourning. This lights a match under the powder keg of female emotions – a keg that explodes when a man comes to marry the eldest, Augustina, and we find at least two of the others have their eye on him.

Lorca’s spare drama comes with an insistence on particular rhythms and a drab look, here augmented by simpler captions: “a door”, “another door”, “a table” and so on, written on the set. But for all its worthy intentions and greatly watchable leading lady, the production remains stoically wordy and rather dull (if only a couple of hours long). Graeae’s use of profoundly deaf or amputee actresses, or others signing for them or living with obvious physical deformities, integrates sign language or some other way of letting us understand hard to hear dialogue (there are caption screens all round too). In some cases one actress will repeat the words just spoken (and understood by us with difficulty) by another, not doubling the impact of the words but halving it.

This is not to say the achievement of actresses Nadia Nadarajah, Philippa Cole, Chloe Clarke, Kellan Frankland, Hermon Berhane and maids, played by E J Raymond, Natalie Amber and Alison Halstead, isn’t remarkable.

But I couldn’t help thinking Jenny Sealey’s production was more interested in overcoming the production challenges than Lorca’s dramatic ones.