20th Century Spanish Theater: From Benavente to Lorca
Early 20th Century Spanish Theater
The first decades of the 20th century witnessed a renewal of theatrical attempts. Playwrights faced two choices: cater to the audience’s preferences (triumphant theater) or challenge them with innovative works.
Triumphant Theater
1. Realism: Jacinto Benavente, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922, achieved success with plays like Vested Interests and The Unloved, which offered limited social critique.
2. Poetic Verse: This style blended Romanticism and Modernism, with notable contributions from the Machado brothers.
3. Comical Theater: Despite its often irrelevant and repetitive humor, this genre enjoyed popular appeal, with prominent playwrights like the Álvarez Quintero brothers, Carlos Arniches, and Muñoz Seca.
Innovative Theater
Unamuno spearheaded a renewed attempt to bring fresh ideas to the stage. Miguel Mihura and Jardiel Poncela represented Spanish comedy-drama, while Valle-Inclán and Lorca achieved true theatrical renewal.
Spanish Theater Before 1936
Theater is a unique literary genre due to its direct sender-receiver relationship between the stage and the audience. It is also a business that seeks to attract a wide audience. For a period, the public rejected works with deep bourgeois social commentary, marginalizing many playwrights. The late 19th century saw attempts to move away from rhetoric and portray real-life issues with less embellished language.
Jacinto Benavente shaped the new theater, finding success with a measured dose of criticism. His most important work, Vested Interests, features characters reminiscent of the Italian Commedia dell’arte, entangled in love and money.
Comedy of manners also thrived, showcasing archetypal characters and colloquial humor within a conservative ideology. Arniches and the Álvarez Quintero brothers were key figures in this genre. Muñoz Seca created the Astrakhan style for comedic effect.
Poetic Theater
This style evoked nostalgia and explored historical themes, with prominent figures like Eduardo Marquina and José María Pemán.
Refreshing Theater
Unamuno’s dramas explored human problems, emphasizing dialogue. Azorín employed cinematic techniques, focusing on themes of anxiety and time. Jacinto Grau used farce to address rebellion in The Lord of Pygmalion. Ramón Gómez de la Serna incorporated avant-garde elements in plays like Utopia.
The Generation of ’27 adopted a combative stance, bringing their ideas to the stage. Rafael Alberti used theater for social awareness, while Pedro Salinas and Miguel Hernández also contributed to this movement. Valle-Inclán and Lorca spearheaded theatrical renewal.
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán
Valle-Inclán’s originality, radical thinking, rich expressiveness, and diverse themes led to his works being considered more for reading than performance. Bohemian, eccentric, anti-bourgeois, and a lover of beauty, he evolved from Modernism to a critical style that distorted reality.
His Comedias Bárbaras, set in rural Galicia, featured mythical characters driven by instincts and passions in a world of superstition and myth. Divinas Palabras concluded this cycle, portraying monstrous beings consumed by greed and lust.
This led to the creation of esperpento, a genre that deformed characters and values of Spanish society. Luces de Bohemia (1920), his masterpiece, defines this genre, blending the tragic and burlesque with a dissenting view of reality. Key features include contrast, rich language, literary asides, and shifts in time and perspective.
Valle-Inclán, a major figure in Spanish literature, created a groundbreaking and free-flowing style. He believed his work transcended the limitations of his time and was not true theater in the traditional sense.
Federico García Lorca
Lorca’s theater represents the pinnacle of Spanish and universal drama. His strong personality masked a deep malaise, a pain for life, reflected in the tragic fates of his characters, condemned to solitude, madness, or death. Their frustration operates on two levels: metaphysical (time, death) and social (prejudices, societal norms).
From 1932, he directed La Barraca, a traveling theater company that performed classic plays across Spain. His dominant theme is the clash between the individual and society (norms versus nature). His influences ranged from classical playwrights (Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca) to popular forms (puppetry), Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and avant-garde theater. He blended verse and prose, folk songs, and lively dialogues, employing symbols, metaphors, and emotionally charged language.
A) Early Works (1920s): The Butterfly’s Evil Spell (modernist and symbolist) and The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal (farcical). Mariana Pineda marked his first attempt at lyrical drama, portraying the story of a heroine punished for supporting liberal ideals.
B) Avant-Garde Phase: Influenced by Dalí and Buñuel, Lorca explored surrealism in plays like The Public, which critiques traditional morality through the story of a homosexual love affair.
C) Peak Period: With a more social focus, Lorca achieved widespread success with his rural trilogy: Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba. These plays feature female protagonists grappling with sexual and social constraints in the Andalusian countryside, culminating in tragic endings.