Interpretations in cultures and languages external to Spain have been integral to the survival of La casa de Bernarda Alba since its composition in 1936. Federico García Lorca was executed shortly after completion and the play was not publicly performed in Spain until 1964. During that time, the play lived in exile with early stagings in Buenos Aires and Paris – the latter translated into French by André Belamich. The play has since been translated and performed in over 20 languages, including German. However, Heinrich Enrique Beck, the first translator of Lorca’s work into German, succeeding in maintaining control over his copyright to the extent that new translations were not published until 1998.
Most German translations of Lorca are therefore relatively recent. And now here is another: Bernarda Albas Haus, currently running at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. An excellent illustration of what translation specialists sometimes call relay translation, Lorca’s play was translated into English by Sarah Maitland, whose text was then used by Alice Birch to create her version ‘after Lorca’. Birch’s text has in turn been translated into German by Ulrike Syha. So there are many fingerprints on this text. In Katie Mitchell’s production, the further creative interests of the director are overlaid.
This is not Mitchell’s first engagement with The House of Bernarda Alba, which she also directed (in a translation by Matthew Banks) for the Gate Theatre Notting Hill in London in 1992. In the intervening 32 years, Mitchell’s theatrical preoccupations have become sharply defined, some of them clearly illustrated in this production. Other elements of the Hamburg staging reflect the 2023 production of Birch’s English text, directed by Rebecca Frecknall for the National Theatre in London. This is unsurprising, given Birch’s detailed stage directions, which have been fully translated into the German text and production, although Mitchell goes beyond the text and Birch’s interventions to portray an even bleaker ending of the play.
In Hamburg, Alex Eales’s set is reminiscent of Merle Hensel’s design for London, filling the stage with a two-storey house, not unlike a giant doll’s house with the front removed so that the audience can see the action in all the rooms simultaneously. These designs follow Birch’s stage directions, which call for ‘the cross section of a large, but relatively run down house’, giving close detail of the layout and furnishings. Mitchell’s production, however, departs from the script by opening with Bernarda moving through these cell-like rooms, switching off her daughters’ bedside lamps. Like teenagers, they feign sleep and then turn back to their mobile telephones when she moves on. The set-piece funeral wake from Lorca’s original becomes a more low-key tea with a single neighbour – named Polly in this German version and played by Eva Maurischat – although Lorca’s pastiche liturgical call and response sequence is partly retained, with its intonations of The Handmaid’s Tale (“Praise Be”) in Birch’s English script.
Mitchell’s production, at 90 minutes without interval, proceeds in this vein, selecting key moments from Lorca’s play interpreted through Birch’s retelling and closely translated by Syha with impressive empathy for Birch’s approach. Julia Wieninger’s Bernarda is physically strong and commanding, but the disintegration of her control is evident in the moments of chaos within the house, especially a chase through the rooms that ends in a death by shooting, which here foreshadows Bernarda’s shot at Pepe el Romano, fiancé to her eldest daughter and lover to her youngest. Bettina Stucky highlights the subversion of Bernarda’s mother, Maria, as an uncontrollable element in the house. This focus, including a much larger part than usual for the second maid, here played by Sachiko Hara as Maria’s named carer, Clara, brings intimations of compassion and freedom into the deadly atmosphere of the house.
Lorca’s play, in Birch’s retelling, provides an excellent vehicle for Mitchell to operate her key tropes of disintegration and subversion in an exploration of female oppression and resistance, in which she is very well supported by the cast and creatives in this Hamburg production. I felt a sense of shock among the audience as we left the theatre – but was there also a glimmer of hope that one of the characters would be finding freedom? This production casts a further light on a play that continues to question issues of identity and power.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
