‘Walking the boundaries’: Lynne Parker’s unpublished version of Federico García Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba

ABSTRACT

Crossing the frontiers looking for inspiration has been part of the Irish literary tradition, and translation and adaptation of continental writers such as Federico García Lorca have played an important role. The dissenting Lorquian voices revive in Ireland to find new meanings for the silences of the original play. This article explores an unpublished version of La Casa de Bernarda Alba, by Lynne Parker (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1993). The study will first review the relationship between Irish theatre and continental drama by the end of the twentieth century, to address its internationalization as well as the relationship between the North and the South; after this, the contexts of (re)creation of the play will be analyzed, with a special interest in the situation of women in society in the Spain of Lorca and the Belfast of Parker. The study will include a revision of the process of Hibernization Parker carried out from the English version she used as a source. Furthermore, an interview with the playwright will be used to illustrate some points. Conclusions aim at recognizing the play as an act of linguistic acculturation and appropriation and as part of the canon of Irish rewritings of Lorca.

KEYWORDS:

• Federico García Lorca
• Lynne Parker
• La Casa De Bernarda Alba
• The House Of Bernarda Alba
• borders
• women’s repression

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the persons and institutions which have helped with this article. I especially thank Lynne Parker, for granting me the permission to use the unpublished version of her play and her generosity and availability to revise and edit the different versions of the interview; the Linen Hall Library of the city of Belfast, for their support to obtain the copy of the manuscript, part of the Charabanc Collection; the Eileen Hickey Irish Republican History Museum, in Belfast, for their permission to reproduce the picture shown here; the Institute of Irish Studies of Queen’s University Belfast, especially its director, Professor Peter Gray, for hosting me as a visiting researcher to compile information for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Lonergan (2019) compiled the data to justify this discrimination: from the 396 English-language translations or adaptations only a 20% were written by Irish women playwrights.

2. References to Parker 2020 belong to the interview that Lynne Parker gave to the author of the article on 18 August 2020. Although some parts of this have been embedded into the article, the whole text has also been included as an annexe.

3. ‘The poet declares that these three acts are intended as a photographic record.’

4. According to Playography Ireland database Parker has so far directed 37 plays. Amongst these are A Mug’s Game (1987), an adaptation of Moliere´s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the new version by Arthur Riordan of Peer Gynt (2011), a version of Phaedra by Hilary Fannin and Ellen Cranitch (2010) or the work of the new voices in Irish theatre, such as Melt (2017), by Shane Mac an Bhaird.

5. A new generation of young playwrights have collaborated with the company with their plays and adaptations, as can be seen in the volume edited by Patrick Lonergan in 2020 which contains Hilary Fannin and Ellen Cranitch’s Phaedra,Arthur Riordan’s Peer Gynt, Morna Regan’s The House Keeper,Sonya Kelly’s How to Keep an Allien and Shane Mac an Bhaird’s Melt.

6. The translation used has been Penguin’s The house of Bernarda Alba and other plays (1992), by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata.

7. ‘a plate of chickpeas’.

8. The Conference has been postponed to July 2021 due to COVID-19 sanitary emergency.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

María Del Mar González Chacón

Bio María del Mar González Chacón

María del Mar González Chacón is lecturer at the Department of English, French and German Philology of the University of Oviedo, in the Principality of Asturias, Spain. Her main areas of research are contemporary Irish theatre, with a special interest in the plays of Marina Carr and her rewriting of Greek myths, the translations and adaptations of Spanish plays by Irish playwrights, with a focus on the theatre of Federico García Lorca in Ireland.

Her latest publications are ‘The Concept of the Edge in the Plays of Marina Carr,’ Roczniki Humanistyczne 68.11 (2020): 95–110, ‘“This is not about love, this is about guilt and terror”: Phaedra Backwards (2011) and forwards by Marina Carr,’ Irish Studies Review 28.4 (2020): 481–497, ‘“Speaking through Another Culture”: Frank McGuinness’s Version of Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (La Casa de Bernarda Alba),’ Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 60 (2019): 71–89.

She has been a visiting researcher at Moore Research Institute (National University of Ireland Galway), Institute of Irish Studies (Queen’s University Belfast) and Women’s Studies Center (University of York). She has been the vice-president of ASYRAS (Association of Young Researchers on Anglophone Studies) and is the secretary of Archivum Revista de Filología.