Review - The House of Bernarda Alba

Melbourne Theatre Company presents

The House of Bernarda Alba

Adapted by Patricia Cornelius

After Frederico Garcia Lorca

Director – Leticia Caceres

Set and Costume Designer – Marg Horwell

Lighting Designer – Rachel Burke

Composer - Irene Vela

Sound Designer – Jethro Woodward

Stage Manager – Jess Keepence

Cast

Marti – Candy Bowers,

Angela – Peta Brady

Penelope – Julie Forsyth

Magda – Bessie Holland

Maria – Sue Jones

Bernadette – Melita Jurisic

Adele - Emily Milledge

Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio

25 May – 7 July 2018

Adapting this work to a contemporary Australian environment is brave and ambitious.  The result is a challenging, absorbing and resonant offering - though not without dissonance. 

Poet Frederico Garcia Lorca’s classic play The House of Bernarda Alba set in rural Spain of the 1930s is adapted for the Australian stage by Patricia Cornelius as commissioned by Melbourne Theatre Company and director, then Associate Artistic Director, Leticia Caceres.

Cornelius sets her version in Western Australia; one assumes the Pilbara, with all this implies.  This is not an austere stylized piece of Museum Theatre but a vital, robust, demanding, entertaining and at times amusing work.

Although the narrative runs along Lorca’s original trajectory the perspective is altered by the contemporary setting.  Here the grieving wife of a deceased mining mogul, bails her four daughters up in the family home for eight untenable weeks of mourning, as opposed to eight years.  

Cornelius’s Bernarda, Bernadette (Melita Jurisic), unflinchingly with passionless brutality demands complete control of her empire.  She will not tolerate insurgence.  The result is acutely relatable to, and very thorny - though not without incongruities and inconsistencies.  Often, it is these rifts that generate shifts in interpretation and elucidate more complex understandings of the violence of the repressive oppression we are witnessing. 

The set, by Marg Horwell, suggests breezeways that are open to the elements of the vast ancient landscape beyond.   Sound by Jethro Woodward enhances the environment and brings connection to the exterior world.  And Musical Composition by Irene Vela augments, with the impressive functionality of, assisting the forward motion of the story.

A lengthy hour and forty-five minutes passes remarkably quickly.  

A contemporary casting, in that the mix of contrasting physicality, further amplifies the individuality of the feisty albeit suppressed women that are Bernadette’s daughters.  This amalgam of inspired performers that don’t completely match is indicative of large family of strong and unique individuals.

Peta Brady plays the eldest daughter, Angela.   With a small tense body she physicalizes Angela’s vulnerability and sensitivity to having her self-esteem wracked by circumstances and the mercilessness of her mother.   And then, visa versa, she responds to flattery and support by, tangibly, opening out and gaining physical status.

Marti the middle child played by Candy Bowers appears more padded by siblings on either side and less at immediate risk of her mother’s ire and more of a conduit for the wellbeing of her sisters.  The glowing Magda (Bessie Holland) carries a secret of epic proportions that engenders hope but horrifies her mother.  Sue Jones as the failing, victimized grandmother Maria releases some of the oppressive tension with her marvelously realized senile seer.

Emily Milledge fashions the youngest and most defiant daughter Adele with a dangerous soupcon of shamelessness.

As cold-blooded matriarch Bernadette, Jurisic, conveys a woman with a life underpinned by fear and ambivalence.  She is determined that her household will remain respectable. But her brand of respectability lacks heart or compassion.   She has an inflated sense of her own importance that begets isolation.  Respectability demands repression.  No one is safe in this environment where deception lurks everywhere because too much is suppressed.  Ironically forcing her daughters to deny their carnal natures backfires horribly within and without the house.   

Julie Forsyth with her impeccable comic timing opens proceedings and sets the scene as a kind or chorus commenting on the funeral with liberal dashing of lurid lascivious gluttony.  She shines throughout.

In the ‘land of plenty’ where this family lives - arrogance, greed and dominion assures there is not enough ‘to go around.’

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Blood Wedding

Blood Wedding

by Federico Garcia Lora

Adapted by Raimondo Cortese

Directed by Marion Potts

Set and Costume Design – The Sisters Hayes, Lighting Design – Paul Jackson, Composition – Tim Rogers, Assistant Director – Claudia Escobar

Performed by: Silvia Colloca, Nicole Da Silva, Irene Del Pilar Gomez, Ivan Donato, Mariola Fuentes, Ruth Sancho Huerga, Matias Steven, Greg Ulfan, David Valencia

Merlyn Theatre 21 July 19 August

Malthouse’s production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding sees language as no barrier to understanding a narrative of overwhelming desire and crushing grief, and potentially, injects heat and passion into the bleak, cold and wet Melbourne mid-winter.

In this contemporized, bi-lingual and ‘universal’ production the performances are strong and flowing.  However the bold staging on a vast desert like space, by director Marion Potts, and atmospheric lighting by Paul Jackson does not adequately support the actors, vocally or physically, to reach up into the large auditorium and move the audience through poetic emotion.  Nor is the small cast able to satisfactorily infer the largess of a huge wedding party or oppressive aspects of community as described and inferred by Lorca.  

This staging’s sense of arid space contradicts the claustrophobic lack of freedom that is at the core of the text.

The intense introductory scene, a duologue between mother (Mariola Fuentes) and her son (David Valencia) the bridegroom, is strong and elucidating and sets a high benchmark.  Both actors create a solid and convincing connection between their characters and clearly introduce the framing motif of violence. 

Throughout there can be no doubt that Fuentes’s mother is perpetually in pain due to the grief of losing a son to violence and therefore desperate to keep her last remaining child safe.  She plays an archetypal winging mother but vocally any rich timbre at her disposal is not projected to fill the space with nuance.   

The design by The Sisters Hayes incorporates intriguing ambiguous elements and motifs of extreme contrast, such as hot and cold.  They feature numerous fridges along the back of the set – establishing a reductive and basic environment suggesting domestic spaces and/or the kitchen of a huge reception a centre.  Stage right is placed a huge wall of symbolic crucifixes covered with what appears to be growing vines that later are transformed into something more disturbing and sinister. 

The wedding dress, beautifully worn by Nicole De Silva, is superb.  

Towards the end of the production as Spanish is flatly translated into English by a voice stripped of musicality.   This could be purposefully done to more vividly contrast the Spanish with the English but the result is dreary.  

Through working on two of Lorca’s plays The House of Bernarda Alba and Yerma I have felt Lorca to be a man pathologically at odds with societies constrictions. Interestingly, through the broadening perspective of this production, I realize the culture he wrote about had at its heart a perpetually brutalizing cycle of damage that he was hitting out against.

This is one of those occasions when reading the director’s notes after a performance goes a long way to validate and inform a production.  

Although, for me, all aspects of this production are not successfully integrated, it is doubtless, developing and consolidating as the actors become more at home in, and start to assertively fill, the Merlyn with passion and poetry.

Well worth seeing but try to sit as close to the actors as possible.

For Stage Whispers