Theatre, Protestantism and Catholicism, Lorca and Ibsen ?

Some time ago, I went to see The House of Bernanda Alba by the Spanish playwright Lorca at the Three Horseshoes, Pentameters Theatre.

As I have mentioned before, what matters for me in theatre is whether the whole performance makes an impact on me. Does it make me think, feel, reflect, is it challenging and inspiring? 

I have seen a play of Lorca before, do not remember which, but it made a strong impression. What I liked was the drives, emotions, tensions, bodily expressions of the actors and their characters, in contrast to the hyper-intellectual environment in which I lived. Life is as much about feeling as about thinking. So I was looking forward to see Lorca again.

Very short The House of Bernanda Alba was about the widow Bernanda and her five spinster daughters aged 20 to 40. They lived in a small village and the daughters were caged in their mother’s house. All they wanted was to live a more fulfilling life, and the only way of life for a woman in Catholic Spain was to get married.

But Bernanda came from the upper class. She did not want her daughters to marry downwards in the social hierarchy. Her main and seemingly only concern was their reputation in the village. For this aim, she demanded full control and obedience from her daughters, which she guarded with all her authority.

We were told the story of a young neighbouring woman who, in order to hide her pregnancy outside of marriage, had killed her newborn child. This was discovered, and the men in the village were about to kill her. In the play, we heard the shouting of the crowd.

Then came an acceptable suitor to the House of Bernanda Alba. (He was just referred to and not an actor to the stage.) He should marry the oldest one, but he wanted the youngest. All of them want him, since this was the only way out of their imprisoned life.

There were jealousy and rivalry. The youngest were caught in the haystack with the man, which was revealed to her mother. Bernanda took a gun and shut after him, but “unluckily” she did not hit. The man was gone forever, and the youngest committed suicide. Bernanda was stiff and rigid as ever, insisting on that her daughter “died as a virgin”. Most likely, the rest stayed spinster the rest of their life.

This play made me frustrated, not because of the woman’s oppression it showed, it was plausible enough, the youngest daughter’s suicide made sense (I might have done so too in a similar situation). The rivalry of the sisters was also plausible, so were the strict social code and Bernanda’s concern for social reputation.

My frustration was Bernanda’s one-dimensional character. For me, it is not plausible that a mother does not have or show any kind of regret, self-reflection or sadness when her daughter commits suicide. She just doesn’t have any human dimension, and I do not believe that.

Bernanda was portrayed as only reflecting social code, and we were given no trace to her inner life. She was not stupid, so she must have been able to see some connection between her daughter’s death and her own behaviour. We were not given any information in the play about her background in such a way that we could understand what had happened to her own emotional life.

In other words, what interests me is how people deal with their own emotions and responsibility, in spite of rules of social conduct.

This leads me to a comparison with Ibsen. Maybe I am spoiled having watched too many of his plays. Anyhow, his plays have a lot of women characters. They are strong, independent and thinking. They love, hate, reflect, and they play games and often they loose. Ibsen’s plays are to a large extent about the connection between social and personal relationship and how and why people have developed they way they are. Often, the explanation why women become rigid is betrayal in their love life. Could it be so that Bernanda is so incredibly unsympathetic because she also was betrayed in her love life?

One of Ibsen’s plays is from the middle ages where Fru Inger is the ruler of a large estate. She has three daughters of which she tries to marry in order to maintain political alliances being important for her own position. The daughters are betrayed, die or give up. But fru Inger reflects and regrets on what she has done to her daughters.

Ibsen’s plays give us an understanding of the social and political forces together with the personal and private life of the women. A struggle is going on both on the social level and within the individuals. Sometimes they are bound to loose, being torn between social demand and own consciousness. But whatever they do, they are not without responsibility, of which they are aware of and cannot run away from. Maybe this is an essence of Protestantism and Ibsen’s influence from Kierkegaard, that each individual has to make his or her own choices in life, and is responsible for their what they do or do not do.

It is this inner dimension that I miss in Lorca’s play. My question then is whether his portrayal of Bernanda reflects the reality of the Spanish society at that time. Is she the product of the oppressive, rigid Catholic authoritarianism that demands people to believe but not to think? Is it Lorca’s political project and social critique that makes him want to portray Bernanda just as a type and representative of the oppressive society? Or is his style and plot as a playwright that makes the play function better as a theatre? No matter, being the central character of the play, Bernanda has no depth and complexity, which for me is a disappointment.