Originally written in the 1930s as a response to the stifling climate of injustice in southern Spain and a comment on the inevitability of  Franco’s fascist regime, Federico Garcia Lorca’s tragic play uses the women of a simple Andalusian village as a microcosm of the rest of those affected by repression in Spain and, like all his work, is smeared in symbolism. Move this stirring, claustrophobic and political piece to contemporary Glasgow where a family is confined to the home because of media hounding rather than mourning and act like vacuous Footballers wives instead of people ruined by dictatorship and we have Rona Munro’s reimagining of the piece.

The girls sit around, trapped in a jewelled prison

Bernie Alba’s (played by a powerful Siobhan Redmond) gangster hubbie has just been shot, unable to believe she can control her five daughters and the dirty business (nightclub El Pasco) he’s left behind, keeps them under house arrest, apart from the eldest who’s set to marry the son of the big daddy in town, but he’s fit so all the sisters want him. In the background there’s Bernie’s crazed mum (Una McLean) who comes out once in a while to remind us that we need to let our children grow up and in case you didn’t get it, a live pigeon literally flees the nest.

The problem in this radical updating is that Munro selects a group of people it’s difficult to sympathise with: rich, Prada wearing spoilt brats, instantly destroying the power of Lorca’s original as message for the people. With a confused adaptation, the sudden bursts of poetry are irksome under the au natural direction of John Tiffany. However, through the process of modernising it, Munro has replaced fascist regime with consumerism, which is an interesting and poignant point to make and with eyes glued to the box and dressed to kill in stilettos and bling the girls sit around, trapped in a jewelled prison. But ultimately the overriding theme is that of the law of the “family”. Whilst this might be interesting to any gangsters sat in the stalls, by focusing on such an insular theme Munro fails to live up to Lorca’s brave protest.

until Sat 7 Nov, at King’s Theatre Edinburgh

For more info, interviews and reviews go to the National Theatre of Scotland website: here