Diction and staging lose the plot

THE HOUSE OF BILQUIS BIBI, Coliseum, Oldham

I’M all for the mixing of theatrical styles and the adaptation of plays between cultures, but I do generally prefer the result to be worthwhile.

Lorca’s “House of Bernarda Alba” was an, intense, dust-dry examination of the pressure-cooker existence of daughters controlled by their hard-line mother in rural Spain in the Thirties, following the death of a their more generous father. It was also a metaphor for Fascism.

Modern day Pakistan has, on this evidence — despite references to Skype, and mobile phones — pretty much the same sort of culture: widowed, ageing mother (Ila Arun) determined to marry off her daughters in turn, though only one is thought attractive. The result is tension and a lot of bickering, commented upon sagely by their servant (Rina Fatania) .

Adapted by Sudha Bhuchar for touring company Tamasha and Harrogate Theatre, the result is unfortunately a mediocre piece of work compounded by what can only be called wilful inadequacies of direction and design.

The story is that wealthy eldest daughter Abida (Ghizala Avan) is to marry a US-dwelling cousin back for the father’s funeral. The trouble is at least two of her sisters (Mariam Haque and Youkti Patel) fancy him too. The result is lots of sexual tension and bickering.

Except it isn’t. Well I don’t think it is: one of the chief faults of this scrappy evening is a general poorness of diction. Half the time you can’t understand what the actresses are saying, part of the time they simply don’t project with any degree of skill and part of the time a couple of them are condemned, by Kristine Landon-Smith’s lame direction, to sitting with their back to the audience for no apparent reason.

So we pick up the story by clues and signs and a bit of petty bickering between the girls, rather than by any clear force of script or setting.

And while we are on the subject of setting, what possessed the company to have a substantial chunk of the action occur behind a wall of the set, seen and heard only through narrow openings?

As if the play, which seems to rush in the second half to a weak conclusion far from predictable from foregoing events, didn’t have problems enough. There seems little point in having a stage then leaving the bit we are supposed to be watching, empty.