A 1930s Spanish Story Tracks Women's Timeless Quest for Freedom

Female Gaze

- Sandhya Mendonca

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I drove to Jagriti Theatre, 15 km away in Whitefield, to what used to be the outskirts of Bengaluru. Frankly, when Arundhati Raja, one of the leading lights of English theatre in India, invited me to see her latest production, Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, I wondered how many people other than loyal fans of the Rajas would be drawn to see it.

I was wrong to doubt. The denizens of my city are sensitive to the repression that women continue to experience. A feminist play written by a rebellious gay Spanish playwright saw a packed auditorium. Lorca wrote it in 1936, a couple of months before he was assassinated by Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. The play originally depicted women's lives in rural Spain, but this production showed that "the more things change, the more they stand still."

The play is about the formidable Bernarda Alba, who declares an eight-year mourning period after her second husband's death. The household is steeped in silence and shadows. She has five unmarried daughters who are forced to follow strict rules and are barred from going outside or having any relationships with men during the mourning period. The play explores how repression has consequences and the dangerous results of desire, jealousy, and defiance.

Arundhati had once planned to play Bernarda herself, but the script sat on her shelf for years. When she revisited it, she felt it was an opportunity to work with an all-female cast and explore themes that resonate powerfully in today's India. "I just felt it'd be good to work with an all-female cast," she told me, emphasizing how Lorca's vision deliberately excludes any male presence on stage, even the much-discussed young man Pepe el Romano, who drives the plot but is never seen.