Completed only two months before the author's execution in Granada at the age of thirty-eight, La casa de Bernarda Alba marks the completion of Lorca's 'trilogia de la tierra española' and is commonly held to be his greatest play. The theme of vitality and repression that runs as a leitmotif through his writings takes on a clearer social dimension in the 'drama de mujeres en los pueblos de España', with the presentation of a household of five unmarried daughters tyrannised by their mother's excessive concern with social class and obscurantist village morality. -- .