If only more playwrights would follow Federico Garcia Lorca in 1936 and write for an all-female cast. Stages full of stubbly soldiers or vintage politicians are so familiar we don't blink. But when dozens of veiled women file into the house of this tyrannical matriarch and her five daughters (contemporary and Iranian in Emily Mann's new version of the play), it's a shockingly rare sight.
It signals how far London – as well as Tehran – has to go if women are to be subjects in culture and public life, not merely objects to be hidden or flaunted.
In Bernarda Alba's household, sexual control, pious display and honour make a pressure cooker of repression. Bijan Sheibani's typically poetic and tactful staging exchanges the religious rituals and political resonances of Franco's Spain for Ahmedinejad's Iran, to hypnotic effect. It opens with whispers in the dark and a brief vision of one of Bernarda's daughters, who gazes out of the window in her nightdress, until a rippling veil falls down and hides her, with the sound of shutters slamming closed.
That slamming sound is recurs in Sheibani's staging, which is sensitive to the simultaneous hardness and softness of ideological law in the home: described in swooshing silk and harsh blows. His Bernarda Alba, the exceptionally beautiful and powerful Oscar-nominated Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, punishes her maid by grinding her naked hand beneath her metal-tipped walking stick – but her frumpy daughters are cowed by her cruel eleganceas much as her cane.
The sibling rivalries between her daughters are overshadowed by the mother's powerful presence – and could emerge with more variety and strength. The most intriguing relationship is the tolerant, frank, unequal, lifelong one between Bernarda and her cynical housekeeper Darya (the excellent Jane Bertish).
Walled up like living corpses and starved of hope, the girls all fall for the same boy – who plans to marry the eldest for her money, but lusts after the youngest, beautiful Adela.
Hara Yannas does well as Adela, despite having to express her teenage sexual rebellion by rubbing herself all over the walls. Lorca's raunchy plot with its ramped up animal metaphors – at one point a horny stallion tries to kick through those same walls – is the only obtrusively dated element in the play, and it is dealt with relatively subtly.
More effective is the scene in which the women rush eagerly to the doorway to see a village girl who killed her illegitimate baby being stoned. Lorca, who was murdered by Franco's nationalists soon after completing the play, probably had his country in mind when sketching this simmering house. And it's the wider context that sings in this thrilling staging, which is eloquent and justified.