For dyed-in-the-wool theatre lovers, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca is an artistic colossus.

Director Karen Vickery, for one, who’s currently rehearsing Lorca’s last play, The House of Bernarda Alba, believes he is “one of the great voices of the Spanish world in terms of literature, art and theatre.”

Completed in June 1936 just two months before Lorca’s assassination during the Spanish Civil War, the play wasn’t staged until 1945, but since that, it’s been in the standard repertoire of theatres around the world, often grouped together with his earlier players, Blood Wedding and Yerma as “The Rural Trilogy,” although that wasn’t his idea.

Subtitled “a drama of women in the villages of Spain”, it is most notably a play with no male characters.

Set in a house in Andalusia during a period of mourning, it sees the 60-year-old matriarch Bernarda Alba prohibit her five daughters from engaging with the outside world, exercising coercive control over Angustias, Magdalena, Amelia, Martirio, and Adela, while the housekeeper Poncia and Bernarda’s elderly mother also live there.

Bernarda is plainly a dictator and it’s occurred to Vickery that with a perceivable current backlash against feminism and the rise of dictatorial governments around the world, there is strong contemporary relevance.

She can’t absolutely prove it but she’s pretty sure that it’s the first all-woman play ever written. Other contenders such as Euripides’ The Trojan Women has male antagonists in it and the famous Almodóvar comedy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, has four men in it.

As a  result of keeping the men out there’s a strong an element of sexual tension throughout.

“I think there is an element of potency and compulsion in his work and he does not shy away from the poetic, although Bernarda Alba is considered his least poetic play,” Vickery says.

As well, Lorca wrote with a special quality in mind in mind and used the term Duende to describe the heightened state of emotion which permeates his plays.

“It’s this almost infinite quality that Lorca expresses so vividly, it comes through in in Spanish art and in flamenco, too,” says Vickery.

“The fact that he gives female actors such parts is enriching in itself.”

And a blessing, since in the theatre world, she notes, as there are more women than men but fewer parts for them to play.

The play has been adapted by  Vickery, but assisted by Andrea Garcia, who is a Spanish speaker.

Casting 10 women is quite a challenge, and  it has been done with up to 19 female actors.

Zsuzsi Soboslay plays Bernarda Alba, but the play is remarkable for the strong contrast between the different characters. Three daughters are more  prominent. The eldest, Angustias, played by Sophie Benassi, holds a deep well of passion, contrasting with Adela, the youngest, played by Karina Hudson.

The middle one, Martirio, will be played by Yanina Clifton, back from studying at Lamda, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, while Christina Falsone, Amy Kowalczuk, Maxine Beaumont, Diana Caban Velez, Alice Ferguson, and Andrea Garcia round off the cast.

“It’s a strong thing to understand the characters,” Vickery says, “It’s something we’ve really focused on… each of them knows her own heart.”

The House of Bernarda Alba, ACT Hub, Kingston, March 19-29.