La maison de Bernarda Alba

"The wind from the streets must not enter this house" Federico Garcia Lorca
A small Spanish village in the 1930s.
On the death of her second husband, Bernarda Alba imposes a period of mourning on her five daughters, aged between 20 and 39, and her mother, forcing them into complete isolation for eight years. This was the Andalusian tradition.
Angustias, the only daughter from Bernarda Alba's first marriage to have a large dowry, was engaged to Pepe le Romano, a handsome young man much younger than herself who was attracted by the dowry. But Adela, the younger sister, is much prettier.
Around the young man, an object of desire for these walled-up women, the house reveals the violence of a society locked from the inside, doomed to explode.
Federico Garcia Lorca wrote this play in prison in 1936, two months before his execution. It would be almost thirty years before it was performed in Spain. If it was censored for a long time by Franco's regime, it was because in it the author criticises the weight of tradition, at the same time as announcing the long retreat of a gagged country, a prisoner of its beliefs and superstitions. Although La maison de Bernarda Alba is not directly a political play, it denounces the weight of a stifling society and questions the very essence of tyranny, both intimate and political.