About the work
“The House of Bernarda Alba” is a drama in three acts by Federico García Lorca, originally titled “La casa de Bernarda Alba. Drama de mujeres en los pueblos de España” (a drama of women in the villages of Spain); people from Valderrubio near Granada are considered its models. Lorca completed the play on 19 June 1936, about two months before his violent death at the start of the Spanish Civil War. It did not premiere until 8 March 1945, at the Teatro Avenida in Buenos Aires with Margarita Xirgu, and reached Spain in 1950 in Madrid. Hans Magnus Enzensberger's German translation was first staged at the Staatstheater Kassel on 13 May 2000.
Plot
After the funeral of her second husband, the sixty-year-old Bernarda Alba imposes eight years of mourning on her household and keeps her five daughters shut up inside the house. Pepe el Romano courts the eldest, Angustias, who has inherited a fortune, but at night he secretly meets the youngest, twenty-year-old Adela. Jealousy and mutual surveillance grow among the sisters until the affair is discovered and Bernarda fires at Pepe. Believing him dead, Adela takes her own life, and Bernarda insists that everyone must believe her daughter died a virgin.
Cultural significance
No man appears on stage in the play; inside the closed house Lorca shows the oppression of women through codes of honour, religious rigidity and the pressure to keep up appearances. Together with “Blood Wedding” and “Yerma” it is often read as a rural trilogy, although Lorca did not include it in his own plans for one. The drama has been adapted many times, including a 1987 film by Mario Camus and a 2000 opera by Aribert Reimann.