Federico García Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba was censored by the Francoist regime because its author used it to denounce the traditions which weigh on women. In this play, set in a closed space where no man enters the stage, you have chosen to have these roles played by actors who are inmates at the Avignon-Le Pontet prison. Why?
There were too many points of convergence between Federico García Lorca’s work and the experience of the Le Pontet inmates to ignore them. Re-reading the play, I found sentences and situations I’d already heard from them. This need for freedom, the importance of the gaze of others, the omnipresence of an invisible outside world, the source of all dangers and all desires. It was overwhelming. This reversal of genders allows us to question our representations: on the one hand you have the figure of the inmate, hard and violent, for instance, with this exaggerated masculinity they can’t escape, and on the other Andalusian women, prisoners of their gender: “A needle and thread for women. A whip and a mule for men.” We have all the elements to give the audience a different perspective on the play, on those actors, on freedom. Making these men and women dialogue is to provide a new perspective on the figure of the inmate, but it also means giving them a different perspective on their own imprisonment and on women. When we started working on the play together, they had no reservations, no reticence to play those female roles in front of the others. It wasn’t even a question of adaptation, but of real convergence. That’s the power of theatre. To create a dialogue between those women secluded in the depths of Andalusia in the 1930s and those men at Le Pontet, a century apart, to express the fundamental need for freedom. Because imprisonment in Federico García Lorca’s play isn’t just contextual, it is physical. It becomes flesh. And it is doubled by the separation between interior and exterior spaces. Staging this reversal is also a way to deconstruct the figure of the inmate as a monster. It is to reveal the intimacy of a family torn between violence and affection, laughter and tears.
A red throne, a table set for a meal that never comes, a wall which slowly blackens as the tragedy unfolds… What can you tell us about your direction?
The curtain rises on the father’s funeral. Then the matriarch, Bernarda, declares eight years of mourning: “Through the eight years of mourning not a breeze shall enter this house.” She wants to close the doors, seal the windows, so that her daughters remain inside. That’s why I simplified the set. The entire play takes place in a single room. In the back, a large wall occupies the entire space of the performance. And that wall is progressively painted black. It’s the work of La Poncia, the servant, the only actress present on stage. As a symbol of a forbidden exterior, she is a reminder of femininity that is both absent and omnipresent. She is the only character who can go outside, but also the only one who remains on stage at all times to paint. La Poncia is also the one who knows all of the family’s secrets, the danger that lurks behind those closed doors. By painting the wall, she becomes a harbinger of the tragedy. In the centre of the stage, a table anchors the family space. A table set as if expecting something. The actors, dressed in black, sit in front of empty plates, as if the meal were about to begin. But it never does. Instead, there is the dance of Bernarda’s children, the weight of rumours, the suffocation, and the latent explosion in every word, not to mention the promise of a loveless marriage made to the eldest sister. And then, somewhat off-centre, there is the mother’s throne, Bernarda’s throne. Red.
This isn’t the first time you’ve directed a tragedy with the inmates of Avignon-Le Pontet. For you and your actors, is showing the world behind those walls an escape from the tragedy or a way to reveal it?
Working on this text in prison shows how the deprivation of freedom leads to tragedy. But I didn’t want to focus on imprisonment, because the very choice of actors is enough to evoke it. The back-and-forth between their everyday situation and the scenes occurs naturally. That’s what creates a break. When they say of the stars that they aren’t the same, depending on whether we look at them as free people or not: like those eight years of mourning—the duration of a prison sentence—which suddenly weigh heavily on the audience. There is a tragic power to those actors that I haven’t found anywhere else. There is no doubt that this theatrical parenthesis is both an outlet and a liberation. It’s a play that invites one to scream. It may sound obvious, but one does not scream in prison. You hold everything back, until you implode. How many hang themselves in their cell? It’s a gesture that is also present in Federico García Lorca’s play. The doors of La Casa de Bernarda Alba open with a mourning and close with another. In between, there is the possibility of leaving. That’s what La Poncia tells Bernarda: the family could move to another village. A village where her daughters could live, get married. But the matriarch refuses. She doesn’t want to run the risk of losing her status. It’s a fear that exists in prison as well. It’s a violent place, governed by very strict codes and laws. But leaving it for the outside world is an indescribable vertigo. That’s what interested me in the relationship to freedom among Bernarda’s daughters. This mix of attraction and anxiety. Their economy of words as well: all those silences, those unspoken things, like tricks to delay the tragedy. Their mother is at the centre of the house, claiming to watch over them with her eyes wide open, but she doesn’t see anything. Or rather, she refuses to see, because she’d rather remain in the illusion of her omnipotence. She ignores La Poncia’s warnings just like Oedipus ignored Tiresias’s prophecies, and therein lies the tragedy: the struggle between one who knows and one who remains willfully ignorant. La Casa de Bernarda Alba is a complex work which finds a particular resonance with the actors from Le Pontet. A dialogue establishes itself on stage between them and those girls. They are united by a similar confinement. They share a story. They take on a voice that isn’t theirs and yet never stops speaking about them.
Interview conducted by Julie Ruocco (February 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach