The House of Bernarda Alba review – Harriet Walter rules as Lorca gets a refurb

Lyttelton theatre, London
Adapted by Alice Birch and directed by Rebecca Frecknall, this is a stylised study in control and daughterly disobedience

‘To be born a woman is the worst punishment in the world,” we are told in Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play, the last of his rural trilogy which follows a house of unmarried women ruled by an iron-willed mother.

Bernarda (Harriet Walter) is an almighty authoritarian, policing her five daughters’ virtue under the guise of protecting them, in a play that has variously represented patriarchal tyranny and the implacably rising forces of totalitarianism in Lorca’s Spain.

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