La maison de Bernarda Alba

Upon the death of her second husband, Bernarda Alba imposes eight years of mourning and confinement on her five daughters. In this house cut off from the world, suffocated by the heat and silence, their desires clash with their mother’s authority, social conventions, and the fear of scandal. The unnoticed arrival of Pepe le Romano—betrothed to the eldest daughter but loved by the youngest—stirs up jealousy and threatens to undermine the imposed order. Under the direction of Sara Mangifesta, the Anima Company does not seek to recreate rural Spain of the 1930s. The house becomes a mental space, a metaphor for all the systems that confine individuals: traditions, family or religious dictates, control over the body, and fear of the outside world’s gaze. Bernarda herself appears less as a mere tyrannical figure than as the product of an order she has deeply internalized and which she defends in the name of honor. Through this family tragedy, Lorca examines—with striking modernity—our relationship to freedom, desire, and social norms. An intense work about the fear that governs us, but also about the irrepressible need to love, to exist, and to choose one’s own life.