BBC Radio 3 - Drama on 3 - Lorca's Rural Trilogy - The House of Bernarda Alba

[Guest]

Lorca did not include 'The House of Bernarda Alba' in his plan for a "trilogy of the Spanish earth", which remained unfinished at the time of his murder.

Wikipedia - The House of Bernarda Alba

Nevertheless, it is good to see Drama on 3 broadcasting three twentieth-century classic plays that explore the hardship, poetry and passion of women's lives in rural Spain.

"There lived Dona Bernarda, a very old widow who kept an inexorable and tyrannical watch over her unmarried daughters. They were prisoners deprived of free will... I saw them pass like shadows, always silent, and always dressed in black. It was a silent and cold hell in the African sun, a tomb for the living under the harsh rule of a dark jailer."

BBC Radio 3 - Drama on 3 - Lorca's Rural Trilogy - The House of Bernarda Alba

[Richard Tarleton]

Powerful, harrowing don't begin to describe this play. I used to have a VHS of this, broadcast in Spanish with subtitles (I think on C4) in the 80's, but sadly don't any longer -
I see the DVD is available on Amazon at over £100 used

There's a lot more fascinating detail about the background of the play in Ian Gibson's definitive biography of Lorca - based on a real-life family in the village of Asquerosa [ ] on the edge of the vega near Granada where Lorca's father's family had a house. The Garcías and Albas shared a well which was divided by the corral wall, and Federico's cousins heard everything through the wall. Bernarda Alba is a "grotesque magnification" of Frasquita Alba, the real-life widow, to the extent that Federico's mother begged him to change the surname in order not to offend the family. He might well have done so had he not been murdered shortly afterwards (and before the play was ever produced) - but black and white (alba) are important themes in the play, so this would as Gibson says have been a pity.

I went to student productions (in Spanish) of Bodas de Sangre and Yerma in Belfast in the 1980s. Also in the 1980s my wife and I visited Nijar, the village in the desert in Almería province where the real-life events on which Bodas de Sangre is based took place.

[amateur51]

Powerful, harrowing don't begin to describe this play. I used to have a VHS of this, broadcast in Spanish with subtitles (I think on C4) in the 80's, but sadly don't any longer -
I see the DVD is available on Amazon at over £100 used

There's a lot more fascinating detail about the background of the play in Ian Gibson's definitive biography of Lorca - based on a real-life family in the village of Asquerosa [ ] on the edge of the vega near Granada where Lorca's father's family had a house. The Garcías and Albas shared a well which was divided by the corral wall, and Federico's cousins heard everything through the wall. Bernarda Alba is a "grotesque magnification" of Frasquita Alba, the real-life widow, to the extent that Federico's mother begged him to change the surname in order not to offend the family. He might well have done so had he not been murdered shortly afterwards (and before the play was ever produced) - but black and white (alba) are important themes in the play, so this would as Gibson says have been a pity.

I went to student productions (in Spanish) of Bodas de Sangre and Yerma in Belfast in the 1980s. Also in the 1980s my wife and I visited Nijar, the village in the desert in Almería province where the real-life events on which Bodas de Sangre is based took place.

I saw Glenda Jackson in The House of Bernada Albaon Shaftesbury Avenue in one of her last theatrical performances and its power and claustrophobic atmosphere stays with me.

Lorca doesn't appear to be mainstream fare these days so this series will be a valuable opportunity to revisit some powerful drama.

[Honoured Guest]

The House of Bernarda Alba was revived only a couple of years ago by Bijan Sheibani at the Almeida, and Rufus Norris directed Blood Wedding at the same address a few years earlier, so the plays do still get regular major stage productions. I will try to listen to these but I find it very difficult to keep track of all the characters in Lorca in the theatre - all those daughters in Bernarda Alba, for example - and I fear that much of the radio versions will be confusing and incomprehensible, with just voices. On the other hand, there's much scope for atmosphere on the radio, and I see the first play credits a chorus of seven male singers.

[french frank]

Radio 3 broadcast Blood Wedding just a few years ago. Can't remember if it was during the lifetime of this forum or the BBC messageboards. Either way, the comments should still be available (for what they're worth!!!).

[french frank]

Time flies, doesn't it? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cky0w

I think that was before the last BBC messageboard 'reversioning' so maybe won't be available.

Yes, it is: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbradio3/F7...w=20#p55859746

[aeolium]

And Yerma was broadcast in 2010:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00twygj

I'm not sure if the Blood Wedding and Yerma broadcasts this time round will be repeats, or new productions. The producer of the Bernarda Alba broadcast this week, Pauline Harris, also did those productions.

[french frank]

Probably 'good housekeeping' to repeat the previous productions. It will be the first opportunity to broadcast the three as a trilogy (my memory was faulty - I thought it was Bernarda Alba rather than Yerma that they'd done before). So repeats would make sense).

[Honoured Guest]

I switched off after less than ten minutes. It sounded phoney, like a rep doing a classic out of duty.

[bb]

Alas, it was a bit of a disappointment, but perhaps Lorca works better on the stage than on radio?