DURING the past year I had the great pleasure of grappling with Lorca's last play, The House Of Bernarda Alba (1936), in an attempt to render into English the power, vibrancy and colour of the original Spanish.

I had become increasingly irritated by translations/versions of Lorea undertaken by people innocent of the original language and working from a word-for-word transliteration, as if a foreign language were a bank of individual items! I also felt the standard English translation was pallid, that a sense of Synge and the Greeks was needed to rekindle the fire of the original.

Bernado Alba is sometimes read as an allegory of Franco repression and, more usually, as a sombre tragedy of repressed female desire in which five single sisters pant and yearn, to small avail, in a claustrophobic house ruled with an iron rod by Bernarda Alba, their widowed mother. The eldest daughter, Angustias, is engaged to Pepe el Romano, the magnetic object of desire, but Adela, the beautiful, youngest daughter, helps herself to the goodies, with disastrous consequences.

Now Lorca did no favours to his potential directors and translators by writing a prefatory warning that he intended his play to be a photographic document". This is, indeed, puzzling when you look at the texture of the writing, which moves from banal conversation to liturgical chant and surreal delirium. I think you have to place Lorca's note in context, that he's warning us Bernarda is not as highly pitched as Yerna or Blood Wedding, that it's much nearer the ordinary universe with its unadorned language and quotidian concerns. In other words, Bernarda is relatively naturalistic in the context of the other two plays. And it is hard for a director to know how to pitch a production. What do you do with a play where the maid, in a very conversational tone, asks for some chorizo (spicy sausage) and, 10 minutes later, produces a beautifully modulated threnody for Bernarda's dead husband who used to grope her behind the wall of the corral?

Benarda Alba, if not unadorned naturalism, still looks to be heavily dependent on language for its dramatic effects. How come, then, Theater Manjana, a company of Swedish female clowns directed by mime artist Nola Rae, could dare to mount the play with few words any extensive use of mime, puppets and flamenco music? This is what the endlessly innovative Galway Arts Festival proposes for our delectation from July 18th-20th at the Town Hall Theatre.

The very audacity of the idea sent me back to the play to see how on earth such an approach might work while maintaining the relentless rigour and tragic mood of the original. What is there in the text, then, which permits such a radical departure from naturalism?

Well, there are the primitive daemonic forces at work all through the play Earth, Fire, Blood, Water, Death, Jealousy and Desire realised in a dense nexus of animal and nature imagery. Remembering Ioneseo's predilection for the Punch and Judy show, with its raw, schematic violence and conflict, we think maybe the Swedes have got something here. And then we think of extraordinary appearances of the deranged 80-year-old Maria Josefa, Bernarda's mother, who dreams of a "real man" who will bring her joy and marry her "by the shore of the sea". And, as the play moves towards its climax in Act 3, we think of her with a tiny lamb in her arms, raving on about having a child: "Because I have white hair, you think I can't have children, children and more children. And this child will have white hair and she'll have another child and her child will have another child and they'll all have snow-white hair, and every last one of us will be like the waves and all become foam on the sea."

And we think of the surreal blue-light of Act 3 where strange, oneiric, figures flit troublingly across the stage, where the dogs are going crazy and where the hooves of the mare-less stallion which had become for Adele "twice his normal size and filling all the darkness", the very epitome of the rampant tumescent male.

So, what can we expect to see, then? Craziness, flamenco and discipline; mime puppets and humour - all achieved without a smile or a pratfall, and without losing the sombre relentlessness of the tragedy. And as well as playing the tragedy, the clowns also lay bare the conventions of theatre, its cliche's, tricks - and prejudices about women.

THE opening stage picture: a chair, a dead tree and a table, flamenco music, the duende of Death behind Art and Life. On the table, a white caged dove flutters and dances in spasm when the music gives way to the crescendo of dancing feet. The bird goes silent and the five daughters appear: five wigs of black wool, five black fans, then five red noses.

Later, the repressed virgins are making a huge sheet for Angustias's trousseau: in no time, their wedding fantasies rise to the surface as they pant and tug frenetically at the corners of the cloth. And when Pepe appears - as a black coat on a coat-hanger - Adela dances around the room with him in a sensual tango of desire.

You can't say the Galway Arts Festival doesn't take some exciting risks! Bi ann.