Mr Anthony
In August 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, one of Spain’s greatest writers was assassinated on the orders of fascist militia allied to Franco. For years, the details of Lorca’s murder were shrouded in mystery but, given his open allegiance to the leftist Popular Front, he quickly became, in death, a political martyr for the anti-Nationalist movement. Yet one of his assassins later bragged of having fired two bullets into the poet 'for being queer'.
Decades later, Spain’s literary establishment, and even his own family, refused to acknowledge Lorca’s sexuality. As biographer Ian Gibson attests: 'Spain couldn’t accept that the greatest Spanish poet of all time was homosexual. Homophobia existed on both sides in the civil war and afterwards; it was a national problem.' And yet in Sonnets of a Dark Love, produced shortly before his death, Lorca writes: 'You will never understand that I love you / because you sleep in me and are asleep. / I hide you, weeping, persecuted / by a voice of penetrating steel.' The sexuality of the sentiment is clear in Spanish, in which nouns are gendered.
Written in 1936, but banned in its native country until 1963, The House of Bernarda Alba has undergone a similar process of queer erasure. Whilst Bernarda’s domestic dictatorship is an apt metaphor for Franco’s Spain, it is the looming horror she locks her doors and mind against that has oft been overlooked by conservative critics: the social stigma and personal danger that can result from sex with men – something Lorca would have understood only too well. Even for a culture where female repression, accentuated by Catholic teaching, left women walking a binary tightrope between sainthood and whoredom, the hysteria generated by female heterosexual desire in the play seems excessive. A frenzied terror of same-sex desire, however, simply echoed contemporary global sentiment; in the early 1930s, both the Soviet Union and the Nazi Party made sex between consenting adult males a crime against the state, whilst Franco’s regime soon began turning the tide on Spain’s previously liberal attitude to gay sex (the act had been decriminalised by the previous government in 1932).
When sexuality is repressed it becomes both feared and fetishized. Bernarda stridently polices any expression of romantic curiosity from her daughters, yet salivates over nuggets of local scandal fed to her by her maid. From the coy prurience of Amelia ('I’d be embarrassed') to the wanton determination of Adela ('I don’t want my body to dry up like yours') via the frustrated voyeurism of Martirio ('I watched you with him!'), the thoughts and dreams of every woman in this house are shot through with sex: it inspires them, terrifies them, exhausts them. Through the combination of male actors and female pronouns in our production, I wish to consider the damage done to both women and the LGBT+ community by patriarchal systems that stigmatise desire in order to breed self-loathing and political submission within marginalised groups.
In this atmosphere of paranoia and surveillance, Bernarda’s house bears a striking resemblance to Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the panopticon: a circular prison with a central guards’ tower in which the prisoners’ uncertainty as to whether they are being watched at any given time engenders an atmosphere of continuous self-censorship. It’s a notion I wanted to echo in the design of the play: a collection of exposed, interconnected spaces in which the characters’ attempts to seek privacy are continuously undermined. In this sense, I was keen to make a virtue of the social distancing measures imposed on both the production and its rehearsal: this is not a close-knit family but a collection of individuals yoked together by circumstance, desperate to extricate themselves from one another, communicating reluctantly across self-erected barriers. I must thank Natalia Alvarez for her ingenious set design, which has, I hope, allowed us to make the necessary distance between the performers a potent element of the storytelling.
I must also thank the pupils for their patience in what has been a most unusual rehearsal process. We have conquered cast absence (with actors appearing on laptop screens placed on chairs), the demands of directing for camera, and blocking sessions that resembled a complex game of Tetris (slotting one actor into a free space, removing another in anticipation of a third). It would have been easy (and perhaps sensible) to give up on this project some time ago, but each new challenge only strengthened our resolve to create theatre, against the odds, in these culturally impoverished times. I would like to thank the school for the support they have given the production over the last four months, and my technical team for their rapid (and good-humoured) acquisition of the new skills necessary to bring you this production in its virtual format.
The House of Bernarda Alba will be live streamed from the Milton Studio later this term. Tickets are available here: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/spsdrama
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