“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.” – Federico García Lorca

The story is set in an ‘Andalusia of tears’, where Bernarda Alba lives with his five daughters, shut away from the world. After the death of the father eight years of mourning await them; until then ‘not even the wind from the street shall enter the house!’ Bernarda keeps his mother, María Josefa, shut up too; only the servant Poncia brings news of the cruel and frightening outside world. Life is still ahead of the girls, while the old woman is already past it – Bernarda tries with desperate resolve to keep them in check, preserving the honour and good name of the house.

In the ‘God-damned village’ where they live, there are no men to marry the girls. Only the eldest, Augustias, has found a suitor, but even him only in the hope of the dowry; in reality he loves the youngest daughter Adela. Pepe el Romano does not appear in the production, but is always present in the girls’ imagination. An explosion is brewing in the increasingly tense atmosphere of repressed desire for life, confinement, jealousy, and hate.

García Lorca (1898 - 1936) finished this dark, tense, poetic drama, among his most important, shortly before his death. A curiosity of the production: Erzsi Mathé, who plays the grandmother, portrayed Martirio in the play’s 1955 Hungarian premiere at the Katona József Theatre.

Written by Federico García Lorca
Hungarian translation: László András

CAST

Performed by Erika Bodnár, Erzsi Máthé, Ági Szirtes, Ágnes Bertalan, Eszter Kiss, Réka Pelsőczy, Annamária Láng, Eszter Csákányi

Musicians: Péter Nagy / Balázs Földváry, Róbert Timkó, István Kerek, Tamás Kovács
Shadow-play: Éva Magyar, Ervin Nagy

Stage design by Anni Füzér
Costume design by Klára Varga
Choreography by Éva Magyar
Music by András Monori
Dramaturgy by Anna Veress
Assistant: Anna Héricz

Light: József Pető 
Sound: Attila Pokorny 
Hair dresser: Kati Belány, Böbe Balogh 
Mask: Hildegard Haide

Directed by Árpád Schilling

Photo: József Katona Theatre

PRESS

• Balázs Urbán: Egymás mellett. Színház / Theatre, 01. 09. 2000. 
   
• 'doda': Baljós árnyalatú délszaki titok. origo.hu, 01. 04. 2000.