Review: The House of Bernarda Alba at Subiaco Arts Centre

The House of Bernarda Alba at Subiaco Arts Centre
Friday, May 5, 2023

9/10

Local troupe Tempest Theatre have adapted The House of Bernarda Alba, Federico Garcia Lorca’s character study of five sisters and their mother enduring pre-Civil War Spain, and each other.

The play draws audiences into an endless summer of scorching temperatures in a nameless rural village with no river, no wells, and water that’s never quite right. As suffocating as the heat is the paranoia, as the family are forbidden to leave the house, forbidden to end their mourning, and where sibling loyalties are malleable, heated, and switch every ten minutes.

That other heat, of lust and desire, is just as tangible, as the farmhands walk back and forth from the fields, all boisterous with song and easy sweat.

In the very centre of it all is Bernarda Alba, played with ferocious intensity by Alexandria Steffensen, a character consumed both by a vicious superiority over her neighbours, and the strongest fear of those very same. Likewise, she has utter contempt for men but has been taught never to question them. When Bernarda stated this is as it was in her father’s household, and her grandfather’s, while being passed down to the next, the intergenerational trauma boomed like a thunderclap.

Bernarda instilled in her daughters to accept their lot, to suffer in silence, and that a woman’s work was with the needle and thread. In her eyes, women were to be respectable, Godly, and repress all personal longings, while the only acceptable roles for them were to marry well or die a virgin, with as little agency as possible in either.

In a house almost cut off from the world, the Alba sisters spend their time sewing, gossiping, and spying on each other, equal parts attracted and repelled by their all-seeing, all-knowing matriarch. Each fully understand the toxicity of their mother but seek her affirmation all the same.

All parts were acted wonderfully, but perhaps Adela had the strongest character arc of the five. Performed with a rebellious insolence by Shelby McKenzie, Adela was the youngest, most headstrong, and most passionate. The only character who wore any colour the entire runtime, Adela was also the daughter who made it closest to escape.

The House of Bernarda Alba had as minimalist a set as possible for a cast of this size, and a sound design almost non-existent, but what was available was used magnificently. The actors hardly ever left the stage, even when not in scene, remaining in darkened shadows to stare out across the fourth wall. This served well as a visual representation of being trapped and unable to breathe under the weight of familial expectation and obligation.

The House of Bernarda Alba is a piece of savage religious asceticism, poisonous anger, and haunting tragedy. With its claustrophobia and clashing personalities, a sense of horror and gloom hangs over the entire performance, but it was brilliantly performed and beautifully staged, from the moment the audience entered right through to the last.

PAUL MEEK