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Spanish male pride in the background

Spanish male pride in the background
Rhonda Dredge

The circular space at the Fairfax Studio was hemmed in by sliding wooden panels as the fluffy coats of a Melbourne winter were exchanged by the audience for the imaginary heat of a Western Australian desert.

Four daughters, a mother, their retainer and a mad grandmother were all congregated on stage for a funeral.

Finances had gone awry and the widow was trying to hold it all together.

Such were the plot elements in The House of Bernarda Alba by the Melbourne Theatre Company which opened to a packed audience in late May.

The play, adapted for Australian conditions, combines the structural confidence of Spanish playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca with the down-to-earth command of the vernacular of local playwright Patricia Cornelius.

The result is a production that takes pride in its setting and uplifts familiar elements to the status of art.

The House of Bernada Alba is a production that spawns associations. Set in the desert close to a mine, it could well be a commentary on the goings on of Gina Rinehart. Cornelius obviously had these in mind when she chose the setting.

Every narrative, however, rests on its internal structure and Cornelius, whose oeuvre has focused on the lot of women trapped by patriarchy, has ironically benefitted by collaborating with a dead white male.

Compared with her previous plays, set in repressed circumstances such as a caravan, prison or the gutter, this adaptation provides space for her characters to move – literally. In Caravan the bed-ridden heroine muses bitterly over her life with men but in House the widow prances and stalks, orders and profanes. She is dramatic and commanding, and very stylish.

The widow is played by Melita Jurisic and she is the conduit for the Spanish pride that infiltrates this production from Europe.

Cornelius was commissioned to adapt the play by director Leticia Caceres and she says it was a challenge.

“I changed a lot. Lorca is about Catholicism and repression. But it had all the same misogynist shit going on.”

Some of the lines delivered by the widow are brilliant. She has given her daughters a command to be with her for eight weeks to respect the death of their father.

She wants them to be perfect. She’s suspended the phone service. They’re badly behaved girls and she’s often forced to send them to their rooms.

She has high hopes for them and wants them to be decent, better-spoken, sweeter, even to display a bit of business acumen. She is highly critical of them and of her husband, a greedy, greedy man who passed wine “down his neck in great quantities.”

There’s the baying of dogs as the miners pass their house on their way to work nearby and an illegitimate daughter with indigenous blood on the outskirts with “a dozen hungry dingoes tracking her”.

Predatory men are a feature of Cornelius’s work but in this play they are integrated into the twists of the plot, driving the action forward, forcing the drama, enlivening the performances.

Two of the daughters, driven mad by their captivity, are voluptuously played by Candy Bowers and Bessie Holland, a dynamic duo of heaving flesh and jealous tirades. The other two daughters, slighter and more inward, suffer in the old way, falling for men and their wicked ways.

Cornelius always unleashes the humour of women but in House she gives them a larger stage for their powerful personalities than her previous settings have allowed.

Women do make great characters for the stage with their inwardness and outpourings but it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of Spanish male pride in the background to keep it all moving forward.

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