Spanish Theater Before the Civil War: From Bourgeois Tastes to Avant-Garde

Posted on Sep 17, 2024 in Music

The Theater Until the Civil War

The tastes of a bourgeois audience who came to the theater in search of diversion determined the direction of the theater prior to 1936. There are two main trends:

  • A commercially successful theater, designed to meet public demand: a drama of manners, comic or melodramatic that shuns the ideological and continues with traditional dramatic forms.
  • Renovating the theater, running counter to the tastes of the time, renewing the forms and issues, but had to wait many years to be valued in proportion.

1. Commercial Theater

In line with the commercial theater, we can distinguish these three streams:

a. Bourgeois Comedy

This genre reflects the vices and virtues of the bourgeois social class. Its main representative was Jacinto Benavente, with works like The Malquerida or Vested Interests.

b. Comic Theater

Under the name of comic theater, almost always based on the submission of customs and popular types, there are three varieties:

  • The theater of manners follows the line marked by the farce. Highlights include Carlos Arniches and Serafín and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero.
  • The Astrakhan, created by Pedro Muñoz Seca, is based on absurdities and obvious jokes (Don Mendo’s Revenge).
  • Grotesque comedy combines the tragic and the comic, melodramatic and cartoonish. Highlights include Carlos Arniches (Miss Trevélez).

c. Poetic Drama

This genre was written in verse—modernist style, sound and music, and in reaction to realistic drama—and its themes were historical: exaltation of big events or characters from the past. In the historical drama in verse, the most successful, excels Eduardo Marquina (Doña María la Brava).

Inside the poetic theater, we can situate, years later, the works written in collaboration by the brothers Manuel and Antonio Machado: several dramatic works in line with the traditional aesthetics of the Spanish scene and obtained great success (Desdichas of Fortune or Julianillo Valcárcel, Juan de Mañara, Oleander, La Lola is Going to Ports…).

2. The Renovation of the Theater

The renovation of the theater takes place with two authors:

a. Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936)

He created the technique of the grotesque, a cartoon vision of reality. Valle-Inclán’s theater is usually divided into five stages:

  • Cycle Nouveau (The Marquis of Bradomín).
  • Mythic cycle, focusing on Galicia (Divine Words, Barbaric Comedies).
  • Cycle of farce (Tablado’s Puppets, Education of Princes).
  • Cycle typical, based on an aesthetic deformans (Luces de Bohemia).
  • Final cycle, which leads to extreme dramatic proposals (Altarpiece of Greed, Lust and Death).

Luces de Bohemia is the first example of esperpento. This name designates a kind of theater based on the systematic distortion of reality. Deformation reaches the characters, grotesque beings converted and treated as puppets or marionettes, language, and scenarios. Luces de Bohemia recounts the night of the failed drive of blind poet Max Estrella and his friend Don Latino through different environments of Madrid’s underworld and is a damning indictment of the prevailing political, economic, social, and cultural Spanish at the time.

b. Federico García Lorca

He raised popular myths for tragic reasons. Apart from farces and Surrealist works, four works are in the whole theater of Lorca:

  • Mariana Pineda is the story of a woman who sacrifices herself for liberal political ideals.
  • Blood Wedding is the tragedy of unbridled passion, from a love triangle ensues love, hate, and death.
  • Yerma is the rural drama of a young and attractive but sterile woman, driven mad by her inability to conceive and misunderstood by her husband.
  • La Casa de Bernarda Alba develops the theme of authority and freedom.

Other Notable Playwrights

Other writers of importance that should be highlighted are:

  • Miguel de Unamuno (in his plays, little appreciated by the public, again raised their spiritual and philosophical concerns).
  • Azorín
  • Jacinto Grau (The Lord of Pygmalion)
  • Ramón Gómez de la Serna (The Media Beings)
  • Rafael Alberti wrote pieces of various types:
    • Avant-garde plays about the creation, temptation, and fall of man (Man Uninhabited).
    • Political theater (From One Moment to Another, War, and Night at the Museum of the Prado).
    • Poetic theater (Clover Flower and The Eyesore).
  • Miguel Hernández (1910-1942), who, after an auto-sacramental (Who Has Seen and Who Sees You), wrote a work of social issues, in verse, The Air Labrador.
  • Alejandro Casona (1903-1965), premiered before the civil war Mermaid Aground.
  • Enrique Jardiel Poncela (1901-1952) represents a kind of comic theater of unlikely situations characterized by raised and ingenious dialogues. This attempt to “renew the laughter” through what it fetched in some aspects about the theater of the absurd. Before the war opened A Spring Night Without Sleep (1927), You Have Eyes of a Femme Fatale (1933), Angelina or Honor of a Brigadier (1933) and Four Hearts with Brake and Reverse (1936).

    After the war, in the forties, he continued writing and premiering works with great acclaim. Chief among them: Héloïse is Under an Almond Tree (1940), attempts to combine comedy with realistic situations comically absurd fantasy, Thieves are Honest People (1941) and The Inhabitants of the Empty House (1942).