Finished just two months before the author's murder on 18 August 1936 by a gang of Franco's supporters, The House of Bernarda Alba is now accepted as Lorca's great masterpiece of love and loathing. Five daughters live together in a single household with a tyrannical mother. When the father of all but the eldest girl dies, a cynical marriage is advanced which will have tragic consequences for the whole family. Lorca's fascinatingly modern play, rendered here in an English version by David Hare, speaks as powerfully as a political metaphor of oppression as it does as domestic drama. The House of Bernarda Alba premiered at the National Theatre, London, in March 2005.

In the suffocating heat of summer, Bernarda Alba's house holds three generations of women in mourning. With few options for a life away from their grasping mother, five sisters fight each other for the attentions of the one man who could offer marriage and escape. The House of Bernarda Alba was the last play written by the celebrated Spanish writer, Federico García Lorca and was made into a successful TV film in 1991 starring Glenda Jackson and Joan Plowright.

Newly repackaged, three plays by Federico García Lorca In these three plays, Federico García Lorca's acknowledged masterpieces, he searched for a contemporary mode of tragedy and reminded his audience that dramatic poetry—or poetic drama—depends less on formal convention that on an elemental, radical outlook on human life. His images are beautiful and exact, but until now no translator had ever been able to make his characters speak unaffectedly on the American stage. Michael Dewell of the National Repertory Theatre and Carmen Zapata of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts have created these versions expressly for the stage. The results, both performable and readable, have been thoroughly revised for this edition, which has an introduction by Christopher Maurer, the general editor of the Complete Poetical Works of García Lorca.

The revolutionary genius of Spanish theatre, Lorca brought vivid and tragic-poetry to the stage with these powerful dramas. All appeal for freedom and sexual and social equality, and are also passionate defences of the imagination.

Centre for the Performing Arts Programs.

In his four last plays (Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba, Dona Rosita the Spinster) Federico Garc ́ia Lorca offered his disturbed and disturbing personal vision to Spanish audiences of the 1930s---unready, as he thought them, for the sexual frankness and surreal expression of his more experimental work. The authentic sense of danger of Lorca's theatre is finely conveyed here in John Edmunds's fluent and rhythmic new translations that lend themselves admirably to performance.