The House of Bernarda Alba, National Theatre – Reviews

"A study of repression horribly relevant to today"

"Harriet Walter cleaves through the teeming action like a dreadnought"

"Director Rebecca Frecknall creates one of the finest acting ensembles of recent years for this remorseless study of repression, set in a house of women in 1930s Andalucia but horribly apt for today."

"As often with Frecknall’s productions, it’s slightly expressionistic... It’s fantastically detailed and richly textured, often lacerating, sometimes surprisingly funny."

"Birch’s version feels sardonic and alive but uses a surprising amount of swearing. I’m no prude, but it does seem discordant that women in a house governed by rectitude and decorum should give quite so many f***s, as it were, in conversation with each other."

"From the silhouetted opening, all flicking fans and fragmented dialogue, this show rewards concentration. The teeming action in the central living room is always dense and compelling"

"Harriet Walter stars in this monolithic, disorientating take on the Lorca classic"

"Harriet Walter is the face on the poster. But the triumph in this new version of the Frederick Garcia Lorca classic belongs to the women behind the scenes."

"In the overwhelming first half, we’re effectively watching multiple storylines unfold all at once, in multiple locations, almost more than our brains can process. The canvas is provided by designer Merle Hensel, who has produced an astonishing structure for the titular house, a vast institutional block that swallows the entirety of the Lyttelton stage."

"Simply credibly directing the early stages of Birch’s script is achievement enough: much of the first half feels less like a story, more of a trip. But this is a production charged with the loneliness and eroticism of the night"

"If Walter doesn’t get quite as much time to shine as she might in a more trad version, she’s still superb: an icy asset manager rather than a caring mother"

"It is a truly awesome spectacle, and a monumental shift in tone from Frecknall, whose work has always previously felt intimate and warm"

"A chilling, expletive-filled take on the evergreen Lorca classic"

"Harriet Walter is formidable as the icy matriarch at the centre of a play staged here as a horror show of the mind"

"Walter gives the formidable, exacting performance you’d expect of an actress who has cornered the market in icily uncompromising women. As implacable and rigid as a church spire, she is both withered claw and shockingly fastidious in her cruelty."

"For while Birch is not the first playwright to cast Lorca’s play as a damning portrait of women’s collusion in their own oppression, her rangy, F-word-splattered adaptation has a stinging lack of piety."

"This isn’t Frecknall’s finest moment – it’s hard to avoid melodrama with Lorca, and this production does often feel overwrought. Hainsworth, so excellent in Frecknall’s Romeo and Juliet, is a bit one-note. Yet the denouement is chilling: a tragedy brought against a group of women essentially by their own hands."

"Stifling new staging of The House of Bernarda Alba stars a magnificent Harriet Walter"

"... in Frecknall’s staging, the family of desperate women are literally boxed in a huge, icy mansion of small, tight rooms, with Merle Hensel’s teal set filling the Lyttelton stage."

"Part prison, part fortress, the house is ruled over by Harriet Walter’s magnificently awful Bernarda, as tightly clenched and joyless as a frosted rose bud."

"The splintered action of the opening is demanding and rather stilted, with fragments of story unfolding simultaneously around the set. But Frecknall’s approach pays dividends, gradually pulling the threads together as the story spirals to its conclusion. And she uses choreography eloquently to express simmering lust and terror: James McHugh’s muscle-bound Pepe spins and slinks sensuously through the house; a seething mob pursues an unmarried mother."

"In a terrific ensemble, Isis Hainsworth’s mutinously sensual Adela, Rosalind Eleazar’s sad, pinched Angustias and Lizzie Annis’s desperately jealous Martirio stand out, together with Thusitha Jayasundera’s all-seeing housekeeper."

"Harriet Walter gets lost in a chilling revival"

"It is rising star Isis Hainsworth, not the Succession actor, who dominates the action in Rebecca Frecknall's production"

"Walter gives Bernarda a grimly pinched and parched expression as she patrols her claustrophobic domestic domain, in which everyone judges each other with the harshness they wish they were not judged themselves. Yet the Succession actor doesn’t manage to dominate proceedings with quite the majesty one would have presumed."

"Bernarda is not the leading character here; that honour goes to Adela, who is illuminated by Hainsworth in another of her remarkable 2023 performances, after luminous work in Frecknall’s production of Romeo and Juliet at London’s Almeida theatre."

"This is house as surveillance state – and a splendid evening’s theatre as long as you have not come for the sole purpose of seeing Walter."

"Harriet Walter is chillingly composed but Lorca revival doesn’t quite simmer"

"Lorca’s final play, in which sisters find themselves stifled in 1930s rural Spain, heaves with repressed sexuality – but star director Rebecca Frecknall’s approach is surprising clinical"

"Repressed sexuality dampens every page of Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1936 play, as five sisters rage, sob and stew in their house in rural Spain. This should be home turf for director Rebecca Frecknall, who made her name with her sensuous, award-winning 2019 take on Tennessee Williams’ story of forbidden longing, Summer and Smoke. But instead, she’s taken a surprisingly clinical approach to this earthy tragedy."

"... using overlapping dialogue, layering Lorca’s scenes over each other as they unfold in neighbouring rooms. It brings a new naturalism to the play’s opening set piece, capturing the stifling, muted cacophony of this overcrowded house... But it also feels frustrating and distancing, making it hard to follow these crucial establishing scenes, and not allowing the daughters to fully emerge as distinct individuals."

"To a 21st-century audience, its protests against the traditional female frustrations of enforced celibacy and sewing can feel tired and predictable. This ultra-modern staging heightens that sense, by confining its women in boxes and never letting them run free. There are powerful moments, but so much of this story’s passion seeps away, lost on stony ground."

"Widow and daughters leave you longing to escape"

"Merle Hensel’s evocative, multi-level set — drenched in mellow green rather than harsh Andalusian white — is the best reason to catch Rebecca Frecknall’s uneven reworking of Federico García Lorca’s 1930s portrait of a domineering widow and her five daughters."

"The piece is actually credited to Alice Birch “after Lorca”. Which means that, aside from additional dialogue which includes startling use of the F-word, there’s less sense of the stifling regime of self-abnegation that’s so central to Lorca’s overheated melodrama. Frecknall’s directorial debut at the National also recycles some of the self-conscious visual and sound effects that she lavished on her much-lauded productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cabaret."

"Frecknall makes things even more difficult for the audience by using overlapping dialogue and showing characters in different parts of the rather grand house at the same time."

"What’s missing in this highly stylised treatment is a consistent sense of time and place. Lorca’s poetic phrase-making sits uneasily alongside the lumpen effing and blinding: it’s as if the cast of EastEnders suddenly broke into iambic pentameter."

"Harriet Walter rules as Lorca gets a refurb"

"Adapted by Alice Birch and directed by Rebecca Frecknall, this is a stylised study in control and daughterly disobedience"

"In Rebecca Frecknall’s typically refashioned revival, Walter’s Bernarda cuts a ramrod but distant figure, too drowned by grief, it seems, to be truly terrifying."

"Playwright Alice Birch (of Succession and Normal People fame) centres the daughters instead, drawing out the fulmination, tension and irascibility between the brood who are raucous here, not cowed by their mother but free, fearless spirits."

"The script’s polyphony has two or more conversations sometimes interwoven with each other which sounds musical when it works but is more often distracting, fracturing the focus."

"There is great innovation here but the terrible swell of passion, frustration and intensity needed for the play to gain its full and devastating tragedy does not reach a head."

"Harriet Walter commands the stage in Rebecca Frecknall’s stylish, if underheated Lorca"

"Everything is intelligent, but the purpose is too evident. Birch’s emphatic version expands the sexual predatoriness of the dead patriarch to include abuse of his stepdaughter."

"The house is a skeleton: a body without flesh. It is a brilliant X-ray of the play: but, coolly graphic rather than stifling, it declares rather than involves."

"Harriet Walter is a magnificent matriarch. Still and watchful, she concentrates herself physically, as upright and unyielding as a hammer. She has lost the caressing dip in her voice that she had as a young woman: the delivery is adamantine, as clenched as her limbs – until the very end."

"Challenging"

"Harriet Walter is chilling in Rebecca Frecknall’s visually stylish, slow-burn staging of Lorca’s classic"

"In Alice Birch’s new version, its symbolism and poetry are jagged, brutal and unlovely; and director Rebecca Frecknall brings to it the same ritualistic dance-theatre aesthetic that characterised her take on Romeo and Juliet earlier this year. It is a challenging, rather unyielding production, in which the walls that imprison a rural Andalusian household of agonisingly repressed women do as much to keep us out as to keep them in."

"These are startling, almost Goya-ish images. But Birch’s blunt, stabbing dialogue lacks texture, and when it is contrapuntally layered, with different conversations overlapping, it becomes frustratingly unfocused."