The House of Bernarda Alba and Other Plays

Blood Wedding/Yerma/The House of Bernarda Alba

The revolutionary genius of Spanish theatre, Lorca brought vivid and tragic poetry to the stage with these three powerful dramas.

In The House of Bernarda Alba, a tyrannical matriarch rules over her house and five daughters, cruelly crushing their hopes and needs. The other plays here also portray female characters whose desires are tragically and violently frustrated: a woman’s longing for a child in Yerma, and a bride’s yearning for her lover in Blood Wedding. All appeal for freedom and sexual and social equality, and are also passionate defences of the imagination: in Christopher Maurer’s words, ‘poetic drama unsurpassed by any writer of our time’.