Bernarda Albas Haus

In adherence to tradition, Bernarda Alba has ordered an eight-year period of mourning after the death of her husband: The ban on leaving their house triggers a dangerous web of jealousy, repressed desire and violence among the trapped women. Although men are not permitted to enter the house and, in fact, have not a single word to say in the play, it is the old patriarchal structures enforced by Bernarda like a tyrant against which her daughters rebel. The set, a dollhouse-like section of the house, feels like a prison where words and gestures are artfully interlinked within a menacing soundscape. Both Mitchell’s captivating, precisely choreographed production, where she continues the development of the virtuoso composition principle of simultaneous parallel montage, and her powerful ensemble bring the play’s events to life in complex shifts of time and space, always resonating the present times.

Statement of the Jury

Bernarda Alba is merciless and so is Katie Mitchell’s staging of the play. Their father has barely been buried when Bernarda Alba locks her five daughters up. She isolates them from the world and its desires and hunger for life. This was how the Spanish author Federico García Lorca wrote the play in 1936. British dramatist Alice Birch has created an edgy new version of his tragedy, staged by Mitchell as a hermetic nightmare. Inside a prison-like house on stage designed by Alex Eales, eleven extremely precise actors talk about both patriarchal rule and domestic matriarchy, about superstition, jealousy, abuse and pain. Precisely timed parallel montages, dovetailed dialogues and accurately choreographed slow-motion scenes render this show into a sublime artistic synthesis that challenges the senses. A spectacular production and a harrowing parable on the interrelation between oppression, power and violence.

Tojuror Katrin Ullmann’s video statement on “Bernarda Albas Haus” (in German)

ProgrammeBooklet (pdf, 5.6 MB)