This is a great production with great acting - if you like a very English take on a deeply Spanish piece. An English take relieves us of the dead-end blackness of Lorca's original - written at a time of dead-end blackness in his native Spain, shortly before his murder by a gang of Franco's thugs in 1936.
      The deliciously relaxed and sardonic nature of English humour leavens the horrors of life to a degree where they are no longer unbearably oppressive. Despite the unrelieved oppression of five unmarried daughters by their newly widowed mother, Bernarda Alba, and their seething frustration, sexual and otherwise, Howard Davies's production seems to parachute us into the sexual morality of Cheltenham Ladies College as it must have been thirty years ago, rather than into the stifling aridity of conservative Spanish Catholicism at its worst.
      Penelope Wilton is a great actress, and she is formidably stony, stubborn and implacable as Bernarda Alba. But she doesn't instil overwhelming fear, dread and claustrophobia; she fails to convey the horror of totalitarian control; she allows us to breathe all the way through.
      Her daughters are more convincing: Sandy McDade is superb as Angustias, the ageing spinster whose inheritance has secured her engagement to the (unseen) young stud, Pepe el Romano, and so her escape from Bernarda's deadly household. Sally Hawkins brings great passion to Adela, the youngest of the five sisters, who is having a secret but doomed affair with Pepe. And Jo McInnes conveys all the venom and insatiability of jealousy, as she obsessively spies on Adela and envies her sexual fulfilment and urge for freedom. Daborah Findley shows us all the knowing cunning of the servant Poncia, who sees her mistressbs feet of clay; but she, like Wilton, is just not bitter and black enough for this study in the horrors of oppression.
Simon May