Jaime Leon
Tehran, November 27 (EFE). – The feminist voice of Federico García Lorca resonates in Tehran with a Spanish performance of the song “Bernarda Alba’s House,” which relates to the experiences and restrictions that many Iranians face in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
For 10 nights, nine Spanish-Iranian students and graduates perform The Tragedy of Andalusia at the Central Dawa Theater in Tehran with translation in Persian for an Iranian audience, in a project supported by the Spanish Embassy in Iran.
“The House of Bernarda Alba,” written in 1936, represents the depths of Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century through the lives of Bernarda Alba and her five daughters, who are forced to mourn for eight years after their mother becomes a widow.
The drama, which is based on a patriarchal and traditional society, connects the burden of tragedy, women’s oppression and the desire for freedom with today’s Iran, especially in small towns.
“This work is close to what is happening culturally in the country regarding the status of women mixed with religion and culture,” director of the work, Hussein Zeinali, tells EFE.
“There are issues from Lorca’s time that are similar to Iran today,” says the 46-year-old playwright, who lived for nine years in Granada, where he earned a doctorate in realism in Lorca’s work, worked in a theater group and directed a documentary about the Spanish artist.
Al-Zinali previously brought Lorca’s works “Yerma” to Iranian theaters in 2022 and “Bodas de Sangre” in 2024 in Tehran. He considers “The House of Bernarda Alba” to be Lorca’s most complete drama because of its dramatic structure and the depth of its characters.
Nada Mansouri, 19, who plays Adela, Bernarda’s more rebellious daughter, agrees with the affinity for the Spanish work written nearly 90 years ago.
“Iranian women have a similar work situation and similar things happen to us,” this young woman, who started learning Spanish at the age of 14 because she loved it and now studies Russian at university, tells EFE.
“That’s why it’s connected,” he says in perfect Spanish.
Sarah Novin, 25, who plays the maid Poncia, loves the play because she believes it stands for women’s rights.
The student at Alam Tabatabai University says: “In Lorca’s time, women were not respected, and now in Iran women’s rights are not respected.”
“Women in Iran are fighting for our rights,” she says.
The young lady is right. In the Islamic Republic of 2025, married women need their husband’s permission to study, work or obtain a passport, and are prohibited from singing in public or driving motorcycles.
Women’s rights – or their lack – have been in the country’s spotlight since the death of young woman Mahsa Amini in police custody after being arrested for not wearing the Islamic hijab properly in 2022.
Her death sparked protests with a distinctly feminist tone chanting “Women, Life, Freedom,” whose echoes today reach many Iranians who refuse to cover themselves with the hijab as a gesture of civil disobedience.
Given this, the government of reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian has eased the pressure on women, which is evident on the streets of the capital with uncovered women and even street groups playing songs by the American group White Stripes.
Lorca is a surprisingly popular author in Iran and is actually one of the most translated foreign authors in Persian, perhaps because of Iranians’ love of poetry.
“Lorca is very well-known in Iran,” Najma Shubiri, the first Iranian of Hispanic origin, a professor at the University of Tehran and a promoter of the “House of Bernarda Alba” act, tells EFE.
For her, the distance in time from Lorca’s time is not an obstacle because “art has no time” and there are similarities between Andalusia in Granada and Iran now.
“I read a poem by Lorca as if I had written it last night,” he says. Evie
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