La Maison de Bernarda Alba

Mindful of appearances and what people will say –“I want house without blemish, and harmony in my family”– the mistress of the house defines for her five daughters, aged 20 to 39, the rules of new society in which women are scorned, cut off from the world and men. “To be born woman is the worst punishment”, comments Amelia, one of the daughters. Angustias, the eldest daughter from Bernarda Alba’s first marriage and the only one with a large dowry, is engaged to Pepe Romano. But Adela, her younger sister, has been close to him for some time already. This young man becomes the obscure object of desire around which The House of Bernarda Alba presents, in the form of a confined drama, the violence of a society locked from within that is ultimately shattered by passion.

Federico García Lorca, the author
In 1931, Federico García Lorca founded La Barraca, a university theatre company that performed the classical repertoire in villages around Spain. He completed The House of Bernarda Alba in 1936, two months before his execution by pro-Franco soldiers. He was 38 years old. The final play in Lorca’s rural trilogy after Blood Wedding (1933) and Yerma (1935), this three-act drama was performed for the first time in 1945 at the Teatro Avenida in Buenos Aires. This dramatic work was for a long time censored by the Franco government as García Lorca denounces the weight of traditions at the same time as he announces the long decline of a Spain imprisoned by its beliefs and superstitions. Through three generations of immured women, the text questions the very essence of tyranny, in the spheres of the intimate and the political.

Lilo Baur, the director
The actress and director Lilo Baur was born in Switzerland and began her career in London at the Royal National Theatre and in the Complicite company alongside Simon McBurney, then acted in film and theatre, notably under the direction of Peter Brook. A director for the theatre and opera, this year she is preparing to stage Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince to music by Michaël Levinas. At the Comédie-Française she has already directed Gogol’sThe Marriage, in 2010, and Marcel Aymé’s Other People’s Heads, in 2012 (revived this season at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier). With The House of Bernarda Alba, Lilo Baur is directing the Federico García Lorca’s play for its introduction into the repertoire. Struck by the topicality and the poetic power of this text, she wishes to give expression to the unspoken dimension brimming with desire and life. She has devised a series of split tableaux in which the drama of modernity plays out against the old order.

Accessibility
This show is available to the hearing impaired
109/06/2015 - 20:30
12/07/2015 - 14:00
This show is available to the visually impaired
12/06/2015 - 20:30
15/06/2015 - 20:30
12/07/2015 - 14:00

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