The House of Bernarda Alba

Less than six months since the premiere of Hoors, Gregory Burke’s self-proclaimed "disappointing follow-up to Black Watch" about soulless creatures living the high life in a moral vaccuum, Rona Munro’s disappointing follow-up to The Last Witch covers similar ground and is likely to leave audiences even colder.

On paper it sounded like a thrilling prospect. Lorca’s drama of matriarchal oppression in rural Spain has been translated to the nouveau-riche world of a gangster family in Glasgow’s east end. Siobhan Redmond heads a large cast that also includes such dependably strong actresses as Carmen Pieraccini, Jo Freer and Una McLean. John Tiffany directs.

On stage, however, it is a bloodless, plodding affair that’s almost completely lacking in dramatic tension. Things get off to an uninspiring start with a painfully forced scene between two employees – Penny (Myra McFadyen), who runs the bar in the basement of the family home, and a careworker (Anne Lacey) tasked with keeping Bernie Alba’s elderly mother under control.

The audience is informed that it’s the day of Tony Alba’s funeral, then provided with a potted history of the family and offered an introduction to the head of the household that’s about as subtle as the neon sign at the top of Laura Hopkins’s set.

Unfortunately, this exposition-heavy beginning sets the tone for the rest of the play. It’s almost as if, with more than a dozen women flitting in and out, Munro has decided to forget about characterisation altogether. She certainly hasn’t made life easy for herself by reimagining the Alba "girls" as hopeless Prozac-poppers – their arrested development just feels contrived, and there’s precious little for their actresses to get their teeth into. Louise Ludgate strives to make something of her character, Marty, but the result is jarring and faintly embarrassing.

With Redmond’s entrance and subsequent performance for a television crew, Bernie is established as a formidable, carefully controlled black widow. However, this impression is quickly dissolved, and by the time she dashes out of the room brandishing a baseball bat the characterisation has lost all credibility, and the play has become farcical and – incredibly, given the events that are unfolding – boring.