‘To be born a woman is the worst punishment in the world,” we are told in Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play, the last of his rural trilogy which follows a house of unmarried women ruled by an iron-willed mother.
Bernarda (Harriet Walter) is an almighty authoritarian, policing her five daughters’ virtue under the guise of protecting them, in a play that has variously represented patriarchal tyranny and the implacably rising forces of totalitarianism in Lorca’s Spain.
