THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA

About the show

Bernarda Alba, the tyrannical matriarch of a household of women, imposes an eight-year period of mourning and confinement on her adult daughters following the death of her second husband. She controls every contact with the outside world and punishes the slightest deviation with brute force, yet she permits her eldest daughter to become engaged—an intolerable exception that further escalates the tension within the house. Federico García Lorca subtitled the play "A Tragedy of Women in the Villages of Spain," thereby challenging us to view this story not as a specific, isolated case but as representative. The complexities of contradictory social structures are concentrated in the fate of the individual character. In the face of fascism, the author anticipates modern discourse, revealing the personal to be political. At the same time, he insists that "the following three acts be understood as a photographically precise documentation," making it clear that this is not the story of an exceptionally sadistic mother figure, but rather a reflection of reality. This shifts our perspective on the action: can we interpret such behavior not as an exception, but as an expression of the social conditions of the time? And what does it mean to attempt to understand a character like Bernarda through the lens of contemporary moral standards? Director Lucia Bihler, whose productions are characterized by precise choreography and multi-layered visual compositions, focuses her work on dissecting power dynamics. In doing so, she eschews the resolution of contradictions, allowing the audience to view the characters within the tension between submission and self-assertion.