Bernarda Albas Haus (Bernarda Alba's House)
by Federico García Lorca in a version by Rieke Süßkowby Federico García Lorca in a version by Rieke Süßkow
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For her first production at the Residenztheater, the director Rieke Süßkow, renowned for the thoroughly composed aesthetic of her work, has chosen the last drama of the great Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Its protagonist Bernarda Alba is a widow who declares eight years of mourning after the death of her husband and turns her house into a form of prison for her five daughters while unquestioningly accepting the patriarchal system of provincial Spain.
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After her husband’s death, Bernarda Alba declares eight years of mourning and locks her five daughters inside the house. Any contact with the outside world is forbidden. She rules by means of surveillance, denunciation and violence. However, the youngest daughter dares to resist her mother’s regime and its unquestioning acceptance of the patriarchal system in provincial Spain.
The Spanish writer Federico García Lorca repeatedly focussed on female destinies. Shortly before his assassination by a dissident fascist militia in 1936 he completed perhaps his most consequential play, «Bernarda Alba’s House». It is an indictment of the inherited misogynistic morality propagated by the Catholic church and can be read as a demand for radical social change. However, it also offers a considerably more complex interpretation, as Lorca mercilessly exposes the cunning mechanisms of oppression between women that are aimed against themselves and their freedom. Lorca took the model for «Bernarda Alba’s House» from real life, as a house in which the women of one family were more or less kept prisoner could be found in the immediate neighbourhood where his parents lived.
The director Rieke Süßkow, renowned for the thoroughly composed aesthetic of her work, has already received two invitations to the Berlin Theatertreffen and now directs at the Residenztheater for the first time.
