Federico Garcia Lorca may have written the Alba family's downfall in the '30s but the themes in the Spanish playwright's The House Of Bernarda Alba are distinctly modern. In 2018 a story about abuse of power, classism and women being repressed as a core social tenet is pretty on the nose, and in her latest effort celebrated playwright Patricia Cornelius has lifted Lorca's "drama of women" from the villages of Spain and set down in the Western Australian dust.
Marg Horwell's visual representation is sparsely effective; a linoleum-tiled kitchen walled in by timber fence posts. It's part stockade, part cage, a mismatched collection of fans in the corner doing their futile best to battle the outback heat. Hanging air conditioners hum and flicker electric blue while Rachel Burke's lighting rolls through the slats to capture time's slow lurch. Cornelius describes it as a bunker and it absolutely has that feeling, the women precariously sheltered from the surrounding wasteland and pissed-up 'rabid dogs' roaming it in their utes.
The play opens with housekeeper Penelope clearing the table as funeral-goers drink beer and gossip on the verandah. Kicking off her shoes as she eats leftovers, Penelope lays out a tale of useless men, no-hope daughters and their "tight-arse, bean-minded bitch" of a mother. (Julie Forsyth is a delight in the role, stealing scenes as gleefully as Penelope steals sausages).
The Alba patriarch, a mining mogul, has been freshly buried and eponymous widow Bernarda, renamed Bernadette, gathers her four daughters home for his funeral before enforcing an extended mourning period to "present to the world the perfect picture of grief" and uphold the family reputation.
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
Melita Jurisic's Bernadette is full of cold venom; a tyrannical matriarch sharpened to a bitter point by a life of disappointing lessons. This isn't improved by the revelation her dead husband built the Alba empire is built on IOUs, leaving her nothing, while her eldest daughter Angela (Peta Brady) has inherited millions from her father, Bernadette's first husband.
Cornelius takes steps to reorientate the play in its new time and place, but in some ways it feels like it still has one foot in the '30s. Translations of Lorca's poetic words, though understandably difficult to pass up, don't always gel with coarser, though more natural, ockerisms, the clashing tonalities causing temporal double vision here and there.
The timeline is a difficult barrier to cross as well, and the play doesn't necessarily do it smoothly. Originally taking place over a period of years, Cornelius has reduced the sisters' original eight-year sentence to eight weeks. It better suits the modern setting but it's still difficult to imagine the despot's daughters would put up with the house arrest in 2018, especially once it's revealed that she's broke. Second eldest Magda (Bessie Holland) in particular, who lives in the city with her secret lover, seems like she would beat a quick retreat the moment it was revealed that her mother couldn't dangle the family fortune over her anymore.
At the other end of the scale, the sisters' alarm at Angela's engagement to relative stranger Peter only two weeks after becoming wildly rich might be fuelled by ulterior motives but it's difficult to disagree with. The role has been deftly cast in Peta Brady however, whose anxious portrayal of a frail "spinster" totally browbeaten by her mother and offered an unexpected escape prevents too much scepticism.
Melbourne Theatre Company presents The House Of Bernarda Alba until 7 July at Arts Centre Melbourne.
