The House of Bernarda Alba, Royal Exchange, Manchester review: Graeae bring production into a whole new dimension

This re-worked piece on the suppression of women by a disabled-led company offers a different perspective without preaching

“Have you heard? Have you heard?” exclaims Magdalena, one of the five daughters incarcerated by their mother within the walls of the house from which Federico Garcia Lorca’s play takes its title. In any other production of the work, these words proclaim a young women’s desire for news, gossip and connection with the outside word from which she is isolated and locked out. When two of the daughters in question are deaf, they resonate with meaning.

This is a co-production with Graeae, the disabled-led company which has created a new aesthetic for disability arts by making signing and action fully integrated. It takes a work which draws on the themes of the suppression, prejudice and powerlessness of women into a wholly new dimension.

The eponymous matriarch (Kathryn Hunter) imposes a strict eight-year period of mourning on the daughters after the death of her second husband, and prevents them having any kind of relationship lest they marry beneath themselves and lose social status. “You will spend your days sewing. That’s what it is to be a woman.”

It is the lightness and deftness in the way Jenny Sealey’s production captures what it is to be deaf, to walk with a prosthetic leg, sticks, or not to walk at all, which provides much of the power. It is not a depiction; the re-worked piece does not preach some kind disability message. Hunter’s multi-layered Bernada - the production’s magnetic core; a complex combination of the malign and maternal - controls through language and its absence. Sometimes, she commands the maid to “sign, sign”, that her daughters may hear. Sometimes she does not. Sealey was the only deaf daughter in an all-hearing family and such are the challenges.

The sibling rivalries crackle, with the bitter Martirio (Kellan Frankland) the most compelling of the five, and the women are not averse to stealing Amelia’s prosthetic leg. ”Give me my leg back,” demands Amelia, having casually removed it. No sentiment.

Mother and sisters ‘translate’ the signing for the audience and, while captions and audio description are fully integrated, the captioning in this early showing was clunky to the point of distraction at times, failing to keep up with the speech. The challenge of drawing speech and sign at times came at the expense of action in what felt like a word-heavy production. But the performance vividly removes the sense of difference. Sealey said she resolved that Graeae would bring this to the stage when she heard someone suggest that “people like you can’t perform Lorca.” People like who?