Spanish Theater & Narrative 1950s-1960s
Spanish Theater in the 1950s and 1960s
In this period, three types of live theater coexisted:
- Minority Existential Drama: This type of drama starred characters tormented by anguish, anxiety, isolation, and loneliness. In 1949, Antonio Buero Vallejo initiated this trend with the release of Historia de una Escalera. Alfonso Sastre expressed similar themes in Escuadra hacia la Muerte (1953).
- Comic Theater: This genre also offered a disillusioned view of life, with characters forced to succumb to pressure from social conventions. However, these plays used a delirious mood to make the audience laugh, providing an escape from the difficulties of everyday life. Enrique Jardiel Poncela and Miguel Mihura are the most prominent authors of this style.
- Theater of Social Criticism: Emerging in the mid-1950s, this type of theater depicted injustice and denounced the lack of freedom. A new audience of students and intellectuals attended these performances. To circumvent censorship, authors often set their works in other periods of Spanish history, thus criticizing the present through the past.
Key Authors of Social Criticism Theater:
- Alfonso Sastre: Premiered Muerte en el Barrio in 1955.
- Lauro Olmo: His most representative work is La Camisa (1962).
- Antonio Buero Vallejo: Wrote historical dramas such as Un Soñador para un Pueblo (1958) and Las Meninas (1960).
New Narrative Techniques
- The Interior Monologue: A narrative technique in which a character expresses their thoughts directly in the first person, alongside their unconscious, in a disorganized and somewhat incoherent manner.
- The Combination of Several Points of View: During the story’s development, the narrator shifts, and the action is presented alternately from the perspective of someone outside the events or from different characters within the story.
Spanish Theater in the 1950s and 1960s
In this period, three types of live theater coexisted:
- Minority Existential Drama: This type of drama starred characters tormented by anguish, anxiety, isolation, and loneliness. In 1949, Antonio Buero Vallejo initiated this trend with the release of Historia de una Escalera. Alfonso Sastre expressed similar themes in Escuadra hacia la Muerte (1953).
- Comic Theater: This genre also offered a disillusioned view of life, with characters forced to succumb to pressure from social conventions. However, these plays used a delirious mood to make the audience laugh, providing an escape from the difficulties of everyday life. Enrique Jardiel Poncela and Miguel Mihura are the most prominent authors of this style.
- Theater of Social Criticism: Emerging in the mid-1950s, this type of theater depicted injustice and denounced the lack of freedom. A new audience of students and intellectuals attended these performances. To circumvent censorship, authors often set their works in other periods of Spanish history, thus criticizing the present through the past.
Key Authors of Social Criticism Theater:
- Alfonso Sastre: Premiered Muerte en el Barrio in 1955.
- Lauro Olmo: His most representative work is La Camisa (1962).
- Antonio Buero Vallejo: Wrote historical dramas such as Un Soñador para un Pueblo (1958) and Las Meninas (1960).
New Narrative Techniques
- The Interior Monologue: A narrative technique in which a character expresses their thoughts directly in the first person, alongside their unconscious, in a disorganized and somewhat incoherent manner.
- The Combination of Several Points of View: During the story’s development, the narrator shifts, and the action is presented alternately from the perspective of someone outside the events or from different characters within the story.