Assistant Director, Monica Bofill, keeps us up to date with The House of Bernarda Alba rehearsals in her second diary piece.
Monica Bofill (left) sits next to the Director Bijan Sheibani in rehearsals. Photo Johan Persson
If last week embarked on a bird’s-eye view assessment of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba and Iran, this week we dig out the magnifying glass and dive into the script in search of events.
But what exactly is an event?
Units and events are the way Bijan has approached the script analysis. They serve to divide the play into more manageable parts that give insight to both the rhythm/shape and the content/meaning of the play.
An event is anything (a line, an exchange, an action) that changes everyone in the room. The event, in turn, gives birth to a unit in which the event is developed, or is killed by a new event, which again, changes course for everyone. To give an example, if in the middle of a rehearsal someone walks in saying the building is on fire, this would be an event. If after a unit where everyone reacts to the announcement, the person says it was a joke, this again, would be an event.
The puzzle that is the script starts coming together and the events are used as points of anchorage for the actors to build the skeleton of the play around. Although there is always more than one possible answer to this three dimensional puzzle, we’re able to navigate our way through the text and begin to tie up loose ends.
And that is how the play takes off!
Sarah Solemani (Maryam) and Shohreh Aghdashloo (Bernarda Alba). Photo Johan Persson
It’s truly a fascinating process and thanks to our fastidious work on the script, the different layers of the play also start revealing themselves, shaping up the themes of the play. We’ve become increasingly aware of the parallelisms between the house and a dictatorial regime. We’ve talked about the unstoppable power of nature against human will and social structure. And we’ve discovered the different levels of symbolism present in a play that Lorca described as a “photographic document,” and how though this may be its premise, the Spanish poet went well beyond that.
Yet perhaps, the most surprising thing of all, is how much we have laughed this week, despite the intense and tragic nature of the play. Or perhaps because of it!
I can’t wait to see where next week takes us.
By Monica Bofill
See the rest of the rehearsal photos and book tickets here.
