You can see why playwright Rona Munro and director John Tiffany might choose the East End of Glasgow as the location for this National Theatre of Scotland update of Federico Garcia Lorca’s classic.
The idea was to replace the tight-knit families of rural Spain with the tight-knit family-based crime syndicates of Glasgow, a McMafia which is not entirely the invention of excitable tabloid journalists. Both have their rules and honour codes that the rest of us barely understand. Both have their oppressive climates, the drizzle of the West of Scotland standing in for the heat of Andalucia.
Stay too close to the original, in an adaptation like this, and the new version creaks with awkward anachronisms. Move too far away from it, and you might as well write a new play, unfettered by the inconvenient details of another writer’s imagination.
And in trying to negotiate that Scylla and Charybdis, you always risk satisfying neither which, broadly speaking, is what seems to have happened here. Munro has kept the essential details of the original, the need to marry off the eldest daughter to another family to preserve her wealth. And Bernarda’s mad mother (another brilliant little cameo from Una McLean) still rants about wanting to have lots of babies.
Line by line there are some fine things. Siobhan Redmond looks good as black widow Bernie and is too good an actress not to be able to come up with moments of real venom. Laura Hopkins’ all cream set has just the right note of tacky luxury.
But Redmond’s Bernie only sporadically exercises the total control that Bernarda should have (this was a play, after all, as much about the vicious conservatism of Spanish society as it was about women). And the daughters, with the exception of the youngest, Adie (Vanessa Johnson), the one who precipitates the final bloodbath by trying to elope with her half-sister’s fiancé, scarcely come to life at all.
Above all there is nothing in the production which really replaces the immanent sexual frustration of the original. Perhaps if this version had been set in the 1950s, it might have been more persuasive. But as it is, despite the intimations of violence that drift up from the club downstairs, the legitimate front of the family “business”, you only fitfully get a sense of the jeopardy that should be driving Bernie. And without that overwhelming sense of destiny bearing down on Bernarda and her daughters, there is no tragedy. It is just a grubby little crime drama with women of the sort that Lynda La Plante has long since made her own.
The House of Bernarda Alba, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, until October 3; 0141 429 0022, then touring Scotland until November 7
