The House of Bernarda Alba

In the play by Federico García Lorca, the last written by the Andalusian author before being executed by the Phalangist forces during the Spanish Civil War, the widow Bernarda Alba takes charge, with an iron hand, of the lives of her five daughters (Angustias, Magdalena, Amélia, Martírio and Adela). The house is the prison where the matriarch encloses and oppresses all the impulses of her descendants.

From the plot of this absolute masterpiece, João Garcia Miguel (who some years ago worked on another of the essential pieces of the author, Yerma) wrote a text as if searching for “the occult and inaccessible secret it contains.” Suppressing some characters, the show explores “the deep connection with the earth and the body,” uncovered by the director in Lorca’s writing and universe, and of which he appropriates himself. Therefore, The House of Bernarda Alba, according to Garcia Miguel, moves away from “the view of the daily life to dive into the depths of each one of us.”

To preform the somber and fearsome protagonist, Garcia Miguel chose a male performer, Irishman Sean O’Callaghan, an actor with a vast curriculum in Shakespeare’s Globe and in Royal Shakespeare Company productions. FB

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