Bán
Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre
★★★☆☆
The House of Bernarda Alba, Federico García Lorca’s fraught 1936 play, is more than a mere starting point for this brilliantly acted ensemble piece from the gifted Carys D Coburn.
Reminders of that Spanish classic reverberate throughout. Bríd Ní Neachtain, solid like a nautical figurehead, is as fearsome a matriarch as any actor in the role of Bernarda. The green dress worn by the youngest daughter in defiance of mourning makes an appearance. The most significant living male character – here a romantic chancer named Peter – is again entirely unseen and perceived through only the sisters’ contrasting testimonies.
We are in an Irish city, most likely Cork, during Ireland’s grim 1980s. Perhaps Coburn felt that milieu almost as distant from us now as rural Spain before the civil war. Maybe that’s how you generate folk drama in the 21st century. At any rate, we begin with Bernadette (Ní Neachtain), a woman who brooks no dissent, marshalling her daughters around the sandwiches as they prepare for her husband’s funeral.
We are left in no doubt that this is a family with secrets. Frances (Yvonne Gidden), the matriarch’s sister, is soon in knotty conversation with her pregnant twentysomething niece, Annie (Malua Ní Chléirigh). Both women are played by black actors, but Annie, supposed daughter of Bernadette and her white husband, seems uncertain of her heritage. “It’s the Spanish Armada,” Frances explains. “Spain was run by the Muslims.”
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Mary Elizabeth (Niamh McCann), the eldest daughter, is in a relationship with the apparently slippery Peter. Mary Louise (Bláithín Mac Gabhann), always correcting herself, is hilariously uncertain about everything. Mary Rose (Bebhinn Hunt-Sheridan) gets little sympathy for her deafness. Edele (Liadán Dunlea), the youngest, is eaten up with unspoken worry.
All are cowed by Bernadette’s assertion that the time has come to turn inward. “Let that be the end of men for us,” she asserts. “Let us close the account at a loss.”
The most conspicuous cultural shift generated by the move from Iberia to Munster is the ratcheting up of grim humour. It is hard to imagine any Irish playwright tackling this material without making room for jokes.
Playing out in an ugly kitchen (around a washing machine that ends up having unlikely significance), Bán, in its opening two acts, finds the actors cracking their way inventively through conversations that alternately appal and amuse. A resentful Lizzy spits in her mother’s sandwiches. Mary Rose’s hearing aids get dunked in the gin. Only Frances seems capable of keeping a relatively even keel.
There are no weak links among the stars of a production that, under the clean direction of Claire O’Reilly, remains busy and imaginative throughout. Maybe a little too busy. Following a trauma right before the interval, Bán turns into a quite different sort of play. A jarring conceit asks for a leap of faith not everyone will be prepared to make. Too many revelation, a few obvious from the start, pile exhaustingly one upon the other. Focus becomes a tad blurred.
This remains an impressively brave piece of work. The audience’s intake of breath at a witty riff on Jilly Cooper hours after the announcement of the novelist’s death added an accidental poignancy.
Runs at the Abbey, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, November 8th
