Federico Garcia Lorca's last play is a highly symbolic, tragic parable of repression: the widow Bernarda's snobbish attempts to suppress the freedom and sexuality of her five adult daughters represent the stifling effects of religion and convention on the human spirit.
Lorca, brilliantly, invites no men on to his stage. We never see the rogue Pepe al Romano, who is courting the wealthy oldest sister Angustias while making love to beautiful, rebellious young Adela behind her back; we witness only the destructive passions he awakens. The end of the play is charged with ironic inevitability: Adela hangs herself, condemning her sisters to a life of joyless, sexless mourning.
What is wholly lacking from Martin Drury's new production for the Abbey Theatre is an impression of airlessness, a sense of Bernarda's house being both convent and prison. There are escape hatches everywhere in Francis O'Connor's too-beautiful set: the high stucco walls have cut-out windows with shutters open, and there is a sense that the side gate and back wooden doors can be easily pushed ajar.
Sebastian Barry's new translation, too, lets all the tension out of Lorca's text by replacing poetry with colloquial Irishisms: "What are you giving out for?", "She was all for it", "We haven't a bean to our name." What happens to this family is a tragedy, not a "kerfuffle". And the tone is all over the place. When Bernarda seals the direction the play is heading by asking, horribly, "Where's the shotgun?", the audience laughs.
A cast of fine Irish actors look right in Joan O'Clery's well-conceived black gowns and headscarves. Rosaleen Linehan is properly, hideously stentorian as Bernarda, Olwen Fouéré commands attention as the pinched Angustias, and Ruth McCabe is the right combination of diverting and subversive as the servant Poncia. Drury moves the actors around the space well and creates some beautiful stage pictures. But there is simply no atmosphere here; naturalism hangs around the production's neck like a millstone.
· Until May 17. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222.
