The House of Bernarda Alba review: 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

She means business: ‘Succession’ star Harriet Walter plays the titular character (Marc Brenner)

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.

Harriet Walter plays the family’s titular matriarch with the iron-willed, chilling composure she brought to her firmly unmaternal starring role in Succession: she doesn’t need to raise her voice to cut through her adult daughters’ more theatrical agonies. Here, her house feels like something between a prison and an operating theatre, with Merle Hensel’s bold set design turning the stage into a three-storey doll’s house in sickly shades of surgical-scrub green. Bernarda holds court downstairs – upstairs, her elderly mother Maria Josefa (Eileen Nicholas) is locked in her bedroom, lost in childish fantasies of running away to get married by the sea, while her daughters seek refuge from her tyranny by hiding beneath their sheets.

Playwright Alice Birch’s adaptation follows the precedent of her hit experimental plays [Blank] and Anatomy of a Suicide by 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 as Bernarda presides over her husband’s funeral – and condemns her poor daughters to eight years of mourning. 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.