Bernada Albas Haus

Bernarda Alba, the tyrannical matriarch of a household full of women, imposes an eight-year period of mourning—complete with a curfew—on her adult daughters following the death of her second husband. She controls all contact with the outside world, punishes the slightest deviation with brute force, and yet allows her eldest daughter to become engaged—an unreasonable exception that further exacerbates the tensions in the house.

Federico García Lorca subtitles the play*Tragedy of the Women in the Villages of Spain*, thereby challenging us to understand this story not as a specific case but as a representative one. The complexity of contradictory social structures is concentrated in the fate of each individual character. In the face of fascism, the author anticipates a modern discourse and reveals the private as political. At the same time, he urges us to “understand the following three acts as a photographically accurate documentation,” making it clear that this is not the story of an exceptionally sadistic mother figure, but rather a reflection of reality. Thus, our perspective on the plot also shifts: Can we interpret such behavior not as an exception, but as an expression of the historical conditions of the time? And what does it mean to try to understand a character like Bernarda through today’s moral standards?

Director Lucia Bihler, whose productions are characterized by precise choreography and multi-layered visual compositions, focuses her work on dissecting power dynamics. In doing so, she refrains from resolving contradictions and allows the audience to see the characters caught in the tension between submission and self-assertion.