Based on La Casa de Bernarda Alba by Frederico Garcia Lorca, Homestead is a play about repression, sexuality and betrayal set in Texas in the Southern Bible belt of America in 1956 transposed from Lorca’s Spain. Hispanic Lillian Beckman seeks to protect her five daughters from violent social upheaval (e.g. the civil rights movement). She wants to keep them safe, cut off from the outside world on her sizeable cattle ranch, and rules her household with an iron grip. It feels like you are stepping back in time to a very different age where farmers battle the environment in a daily fight for survival and land is the great prize.
Act one opens just after the wake – Lillian Beckman has buried her husband, Edridge Beckman, and the family are dressed in mourning garments. We’d guess that Lilian Beckman’s character is the most difficult to play because of the range of emotions she expresses. Deborah Kearne executes this masterfully. Rachel Mullock is the grief-stricken Mary Beth Beckman who desperately misses her father. Grief is stamped on like every other emotion – only religious piety is permitted in the Beckman household.
Agnes Beckman, Lillian’s eldest daughter, is courting the elusive Antonio Hernandez. Madeleine Schofield is a typical older child who does things right and questions her own emotions. Lexi Pickett captures most of the laughs in the play, she represents innocence and childhood.
Ava Gypsy poignantly marks the passage of time: “Tick tock, tick tock” in a world where time stands still until Elvis makes a fleeting appearance on the radio. Roisin Wilde plays Adele Beckman, whose need for self-expression is greatest with devastating results.
Steven Dykes draws a parallel with Tennessee Williams as he writes: “The daughters’ sense of themselves is defined essentially in terms of their sexuality and their self-esteem in terms of their freedom to express the desire they feel. This definition of desire as a force of opposition, a passionate, anti-intellectual defiance of oppression, even death, lies at the heart of American drama.” Direction by Conor Baum is excellent.
Sharon Drain has a lovely part as Birdie Mclean, the housekeeper and confidant who tries to hold the family together and we discover that Clarice Bledsoe (Rosanna Bini) has been up to mischief.
The characters in Homestead explore a complex web of emotions, intensity, toxicity and illicit love. Lillian’s daughters are desperate to experience life in all its fullness. Nothing is quite what it seems, and bitter sibling rivalries emerge. Repression cannot be the end of the story for these young adults, desperate to break free.
Brighton Open Air Theatre, Thursday 22nd August 2024
Photos by Sam Cartwright
