THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA

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Bernarda Alba decreed that reputation must be defended at all costs, even at the expense of the happiness of the eight women locked behind the walls. The barred windows only allow the illusion of freedom, and money is at the heart of the planned marriage between the most desired young man in the village and the oldest of the sisters. And if love has blossomed in other hearts, it is merely a symptom of freedom, which must be eradicated from the very start in the concentration-like space created over the centuries by the oppression of women through patriarchal traditions.

The House of Bernarda Alba is the final play in what commentators refer to as Federico García Lorca’s "rural trilogy," alongside Blood Wedding and Yerma.

The author’s general subtitle is "A Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain." To tell this drama, Lorca sets the scene in a house in Andalusia where the strictest mourning has been imposed, no men remain, and the matriarch Bernarda Alba exerts dictatorial control over her five daughters, her elderly mother, and the servant. Conformity, obedience, fundamentalism, and the repression of emotions cannot, however, last forever, in the face of the volatile and ever-changing nature of femininity, with love, passion, courage, rebellion, and self-sacrifice. The aspiration for love and freedom inevitably crashes against the unyielding walls of the House of Bernarda Alba.

Cast

• Bernarda Alba: Luiza Martinescu
• La Poncia: Laura Iordan
• Maria Josefa: Mirela Pană
• Angustias: Alina Manţu
• Magdalena: Cristiana Luca
• Amelia: Otilia Nicoară
• Martirio: Mihaela Velicu
• Adela: Ecaterina Lupu

Reviews

In the name of tradition, Bernarda Alba enforces the dictatorship of isolation. Luiza Martinescu controls the character’s tone and gestures with precision and intelligence, never once yielding to the temptation of stealing the spotlight. It is enough that she imposes the rule that upends everyone’s life. On one side of the generational spectrum, Mirela Pană’s mother figure plays at lucidity, delivering with great gusto both episodes in which she seems anchored in a definitively lost past and biting quips that savagely expose the hypocrisy of the present. On the other side, the young daughters wait—like Beckett’s two characters, like Chekhov’s three sisters—for an arrival and, later, a departure. Looking both from within and from outside the white house built in black, Laura Iordan’s La Poncia brings the village gossip to the ears of the one whose eyes refuse to see. The five are perfect victims. Gazing out and, at times, escaping through the windows (the text mentions bars placed before each of them, but Alexandra Budianu and Diana Mititelu wisely choose not to represent them, keeping them solely in the minds of the characters), the girls give the impression of a flight that starts again and again, only to be interrupted again and again. In the end, it is another form of floating that will announce and visually mark the tragedy. The old woman, her daughter, and her granddaughters are united, at a certain moment, by a haunting song, first sung by the grandmother and then taken up by all. The sisters fully live out their complicity in flamboyant moments of wild dancing (the soundtrack dominated by the obsessive "You Don’t Own Me", the hit released by Lesley Gore in 1963) and in strikingly staged "tableaux vivants", brought to life by Mititelu & Niculescu’s direction and lighting. The scene of the five bathtubs enveloped in blue spotlights has every chance of making history. The generational spectrum is also spatialized within the 19-year gap separating the girls who dream of marriage (which, in the context of the era, means liberation). The infectious exuberance of the youngest, played by Ecaterina Lupu, starkly contrasts with the fragility and insecurity of the “senior” sister, portrayed by Alina Manțu. Somewhere, in the shadow of the duel between these two for the same man, Mihaela Velicu’s Martirio dreams, plots, and schemes. The passion of this trio is accompanied—though not entirely from the sidelines—by the impetuousness of Cristiana Luca’s Magdalena and the lingering innocence of Otilia Nicoară’s Amelia.

Mihai Brezeanu - LiterNet

https://agenda.liternet.ro/articol/29633/Mihai-Brezeanu/O-tragedie-luminoasa-Casa-Bernardei-Alba.html

[...]The house-as-monastery, the house-as-prison - through the director’s vision, it becomes an insular society reduced to the family cell, where the mother’s absolutism stifles the vital energy of youth. An island inhabited only by women, ruled by a mother who has reached the age of sterility and enforces abstinence - both social and sexual. The widowed Bernarda leads a battle to suppress the overwhelming eroticism of her five daughters, aged 20 to 39, among whom exists not only a social hierarchy - determined by the prospect of securing a suitor - but also a passionate one, driven by erotic impulse. Only the eldest daughter possesses a dowry - an inheritance from her father, Bernarda’s first husband - that entitles her to the liberating prospect of marriage, and thus, the desperation of the younger sisters intensifies as their age decreases. These women are victims of social customs, whose guarantor and defender is their own mother. Music serves as an off-stage commentary, the voice of a manifesto for freedom. The song playing on the radio, later sung by Bernarda’s daughters—You Don’t Own Me (Lesley Gore, 1964)—connects their struggle to the sexual liberation of Generation X, bridging two eras through the act of self-determination, achieved by breaking restrictions at any cost. Narratively, jealousy between the youngest sisters - born from an illicit attraction to the same man, the suitor of their wealthier eldest sister - leads to betrayal, with Martirio conspiring against Adela. True to the dual meaning of her name, Martirio is not only the witness (mártir) to Adela’s defiance but also bears on her face the marks of compromised beauty - perhaps from an accident or a birth defect. While Martirio only dreams of Pepe Romano, Adela acts and experiences carnal love. The nighttime bedroom scenes gradually reveal the suffocating pressure of the daughters’ need for freedom. Dressed in white nightgowns, their bodies exude an unspoken sensuality - fragile, feminine, and radiant with suppressed desire. The backdrop, a screen-wall, offers a translucent view of the family’s social image, rendered in baroque, calophile silhouettes that resonate with the unspoken suffering contained within the house’s walls. The bleak atmosphere is heightened by chiaroscuro lighting in the “social” scenes, while the funeral image - with a group of veiled women, their faces hidden behind bouquets of flowers - becomes a striking symbol of squandered youth, of fleeting beauty sacrificed. The daughters' bath scene, with five bathtubs aligned under the bluish glow of the moon, associates the condition of womanhood with the duality of love and death - a recurring motif in Lorca’s poetics. The same eerie light lures Adela toward escape through the room’s only window, into forbidden love and a fatal destiny. The irresistible call of eros is merely one of death’s many disguises, triumphant in Adela’s final suicide and in the youth condemned within the house’s walls. Alina Manțu (Angustias), Cristiana Luca (Magdalena), and Otilia Nicoară (Amelia) embody tempered versions of femininity as they approach maturity, while the direction shapes domestic situations of ironic complicity and sarcastic competition among sisters, emphasizing the boundless energy of the youngest - Mihaela Velicu (Martirio) and Ecaterina Lupu (Adela). The climactic betrayal scene, the apex of repressed erotic impulses, reaches an expressionist intensity, with Mihaela Velicu embodying the inner torment of jealousy, fueled by Ecaterina Lupu’s unbridled passion. A pillar of unyielding authority, Luiza Martinescu’s Bernarda Alba commands maternal control through rigid posture and firm gestures. Within this lineage, the senile inertia of the grandmother, Maria Josefa (Mirela Pană, in a playfully nuanced performance), delivers a counterpoint—the transmission of freedom’s values to her granddaughters, which she defends with fists and protests from behind closed doors. The grandmother represents a model of rebellion that the granddaughters fear, and in this light, the production subtly explores the dialectic of submission and defiance in generational conflict. The servant, La Poncia (Laura Iordan), serves as a lucid observer, a witness and critic of excess, resigned to the fatal destiny of women bound by social conformity.

Oana Cristea Grigorescu - Revista Scena

https://revistascena.ro/cronica-saptamanii/cine-se-teme-de-femei-casa-bernardei-alba-la-teatrul-de-stat-constanta/

In The House of Bernarda Alba, Diana Mititelu does not aim to spatially or culturally reconstruct the rural Spain where Lorca originally set his play. In the absence of that fiery, playful, passionate, and deeply instinctual Spanish spirit - impossible to recreate without tapping into the inner tectonics of the individual - such an Andalusia, partially transplanted onto a Romanian stage, would come off as artificial. Instead, the director’s reading opts, deliberately minimalist in tone, to distill the core situation and symbols of Lorca’s play, cleverly exploiting the universal themes that give it enduring relevance, anywhere and anytime. [...] Without ever losing sight of its chilling relevance to present-day realities, the Constanța production strikes with its disarming simplicity - that less is more ethos that opens vital spaces for ambiguity and multiple interpretations. But most of all, it’s marked by the director’s complete trust in the chosen text and cast. A rare trust on Romanian stages, where so many productions are warped by insecurity and directorial ego, overstuffed and suffocated by excess. This rare trust manifests on stage in the absence of distracting directorial gimmicks, allowing the essence of the text to shine. It’s a trust that seems to extend beyond the production itself - an essential part of the rehearsal process and creative atmosphere, and a testament to the director’s ability to read and harmonize the energies of her creative team. Luiza Martinescu’s Bernarda has a gaze that freezes and a voice that cuts to the bone. With perfect posture, an implacable face, and unsettling self-assurance, the actress seductively balances the two masks of this tyrannical mother: imposing and unshakable when she knows she’s being watched, tender and unexpectedly human when she thinks she’s alone. A revelatory character role, Maria Josefa - played by Mirela Pană - embodies the past stubbornly pushing its way into the present through a delirious, liberating, and consuming dance. At the opposite pole, grounded in reality and providing the only link to the longed-for, mysterious outside world, Laura Iordan’s La Poncia operates as an essential cog in the household machinery, with boundless cunning and a kindly demeanor that subtly conceals the servant’s true intentions. Alina Manțu carefully shades the vulnerability of the eldest sister, semi-isolated by both heredity and emotion from the rest of her family. In her portrayal, Angustias internalizes the failure of a life lived against the clock, escaping into the illusion of an arranged marriage with Pepe Romano - her only perceived way out of the familial prison. Cristiana Luca gives Magdalena a harsh, ironic detachment - the result of a jarring coming-of-age for someone forced into a pseudo-parental role toward her sisters. In a provocatively unexpected contre-emploi that showcases her stage versatility, the actress also allows glimpses of the character’s sensitivity - buried desires and prematurely stifled dreams. As the youngest daughter fated for tragedy, Ecaterina Lupu channels the full force of youth - driven by the need to love and be loved, full of paradox and adrenaline, innocence and playful defiance. The green dress and boyish haircut suit Adela perfectly, as Lupu infuses her with an at-times serious, at-times whimsical impertinence and a disarming sensitivity. Otilia Nicoară brings subtlety to the role of Amelia, her silences loaded with meaning and her consistent attention to her stage partners turning the character into a needed point of equilibrium amid the storm of energies around her. Mihaela Velicu’s Martirio is a true revelation. An uncomfortable, thankless role - seething with repressed frustrations and deep isolation - transformed through inspired acting into the emotional engine of the entire performance. Her character’s screams - an eruption of painful loneliness and stifled suffering - burst forth with the power of Munch’s The Scream. And yet, this Martirio is terribly beautiful. Terribly beautiful despite the rage, despite the schemes, despite the self-loathing and misanthropy, despite her conviction that she is unlovable. Terribly beautiful without suspecting for a second just how beautiful she is.

Daria Ancuța - Ziua de Constanța

https://www.ziuaconstanta.ro/stiri/cultura/revolutia-fetelor-incepe-in-cada-casa-bernardei-alba-la-teatrul-de-stat-constanta-galerie-foto-894730.html