Federico Garcia Lorca finished his great play about the widowed matriarch and her five downtrodden daughters just two months before his murder by Franco's fascists.
It is impossible not to see in the story of Bernarda Alba, who rules her daughters and her servants with an iron rod, as a metaphor for Spanish society locked in outdated codes of honour - easy prey for the dictator. You imagine that Lynn Farleigh's seriously scary Bernarda Alba, who barks at her bereaved children: "Less wailing, more work", could easily conquer Europe in an afternoon and still be home in time for tea.
Auriol Smith's production, with a new translation by Rebecca Morahan, not only suggests this but shows how the downtrodden collude in their own oppression. There is no sisterhood among sisters here, only envy fuelled by despair as they realise that only the oldest, Angustias, now wealthy through their father's will, has any chance of marriage and escape. "You will behave as if the walls and windows had been sealed with bricks," says Bernarda Alba, announcing eight years of mourning. In fact, these women have already walled themselves up.
This is a play that is brooding, dark and heavy. Smith opts for a design that, with its white-lace tablecloths (perhaps the preparations for a trousseau that will never be used), is bright and airy. This may be authentically Spanish, but it makes it hard to create the right atmosphere. Even in black, the daughters all look as fresh as spring daisies. There is too little sense of oppressive heat and suffocation, and it takes too long for the passion to take fire, though when it does in the final act, it burns fiercely.
Some of the younger performers betray their inexperience, but Rowena Cooper is excellent as the servant who provides a bridge between mother and daughters, and Paula Stockbridge suggests that the quietly desperate Angustias knows a truth that she will not admit. But it is Farleigh's evening as she roars like a caged tiger, mad and very, very sad.
· Until April 19. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
