The Spanish Theater from 1939 to 1970: A Historical Overview
ITEM 10: THE SPANISH THEATER FROM 1939 TO 1970
The drama followed a similar evolution to the novel and went through the same stages, though with some peculiarities. Given its special characteristics (half literary genre, half show), it was more subject to extra-literary pressures: the commercial and censorship.
Although Arniches and Benavente continued to write and successfully debuted, the war meant an inevitable breakdown: Valle-Inclán, García Lorca, and Muñoz Seca died (the last two killed), and many fled into exile. Among the exiles, Alejandro Casona stands out, author of a poetic drama, very well built, that raises the conflict between illusion and truth. In the sixties, he returned to Spain, where he began to represent his works, some written before the war (La Sirena Varada, Lope de Vega prize in 1934, or Nuestra Natacha), others in exile (La dama del alba) or already in Spain (El caballero de gold spurs, on Quevedo).
Trends in the Forties Theater
Besides light works, magazines, and vaudeville with which the public aspired only to have fun, there was a well-built theater in line with the high comedy of Benavente, with elegant, fluid, agile, and resourceful dialogues, and moral or social issues such as family problems, jealousy, personal ambition, adultery… sometimes in a low or ideological pitch (J.I. Luca de Tena, J. M ª. Pemán, J. Calvo Sotelo), some in a lighter tone, kind or sentimental (Edgar Neville, Lopez Rubio, Victor Ruiz Iriarte).
Special mention deserves the work of two authors: E. Jardiel Poncela and M. Mihura.
Their theater develops the comic possibilities of language through misunderstanding, brilliant dialogue, and crazy puns. But often, beneath the humor lies a bitter and skeptical view of reality. Both share equally what might be called “logical absurdity” and that surprise the audience by foolish or absurd situations, which are explained throughout the work.
Jardiel Poncela (1904-1952), novelist and playwright, had already achieved popularity and prestige before the war. Among the titles of his plays include: Four hearts with brake and reverse or Heloise is beneath an almond tree.
Miguel Mihura (1906-1977) wrote plays, screenplays, and comic journalism (he is founder and director of La Codorniz). In 1952, he released Three Hats, written twenty years earlier, a time that could not be represented because its avant-garde aesthetic was misunderstood by the general public. The work was a big hit with the young university public, who saw in Mihura a certain rebelliousness that broke with the form and the themes of the theater of the moment. Mihura proposes a different vision of society as expressed sympathy for characters and marginal unbiased, faced with a world corny and conventional corseted, submitted under the semblance of order and decency. The language he ties the work of avant-garde with Jardiel Poncela and Gomez de la Serna and his critical view of society was the theater of the absurd league of Beckett or Ionesco.
Following the success of Three Hats, he evolves into a theater in which he smooths the conflicting arguments, while keeping the absurd joke, nonsensical language, and its satirical tone, for example, The strange family and Maribel (1959) and Ninette and M. de Murcia (1964).
Social Realism
With a slight delay on the novel, emerged in the second half of the fifties a generation called realistic. Social realism in stage plays produced a series of dramas characterized by:
– Social issues: social and political injustice, migration, intolerance…
– A pessimistic, bitter, and hopeless tone.
– Some flat characters, without psychological complexity, which is seen primarily as representatives of a social sector (which constitute the collective protagonist of the novel of the same years).
– A simple, direct, sometimes violent language, with an abundance of conversational turns.
The main representative of this group is Alfonso Sastre, advocate of a theater of complaint and protest, which is an instrument transformer stirrer and reality. Squad premiered in 1953 to his death, the theater staged by university and banned after three performances. Thereafter, the work of Sastre (The gag, Death in the neighborhood, William Tell has sad eyes) is known only through minority representation made by amateurs, or through reading.
In the theater of social Alfonso Sastre predominates over the individual, hence derives a little simplistic and schematic in creating characters and environments. In its last stage, the theater of social realism Sastre evolves towards a more symbolic and imaginative drama.
Other authors of this group are Carlos Muniz (The inkwell), Lauro Olmo (The shirt).
However, the primary name, not just this time but throughout the Spanish theater from 1939, is Antonio Buero Vallejo.
Antonio Buero Vallejo
He became known in 1949 winning the Lope de Vega in Historia de una escalera. The theater poses a moral problem: the search for truth difficult and painful, but necessary. And it is tragic, in the classic manner, because each person is ultimately responsible for their actions, which the company determines, but not determine, and must suffer the consequences. The tragedy comes from the contemplation of his effect on other characters in the spectator (catharsis, another tragic feature, achieved through fear or mercy to what is contemplated).
Buero’s works are realistic in the sense of being constructed with real dialogues and equally plausible scenarios, but are both symbolic because they transcend this reality and only acquire meaning (the cell in The foundation or basement in The skylight).
The same happens with the characters. In this sense are many characters with physical or mental defects, a symbol of human limitations or the loneliness of man, but often develop a sixth sense that makes them overcome these limitations, producing the paradox of “crazy lucid” or the “blind seer”. The blind are precisely his most repeated (En la ardiente oscuridad, El concierto de San Ovidio, Arrival of the gods).
Traditionally, it has divided its production into three groups:
– Realistic dramas, involve a critical examination of Spanish society. Generally identified with the early years of his dramatic career (Story of a staircase, Today is a holiday).
– Historical drama. The past becomes the ideal vehicle to analyze in matters of this detached (The concert in San Ovidio, A dreamer for a town, Las Meninas, The detonation).
– Construction of a symbolic nature. Marked by the growing presence of scenery procedures – called “immersion effect” that introduce the viewer into the inner landscape of the characters: the father’s obsession with the train in The skylight, Goya’s deafness in The Sleep of Reason.
The Theater in the 1960s
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In the late sixties the theater renovation is the definitive overcoming of realism and experimentation of new dramatic forms, always in a socially critical moral and political. The companies are actors anddirectors who manage their own premises, outside the commercial theater. It is generally inclined to the theater designed as a show pitch garde, experimental, made the most of the time, by themselves integrating text, mime, circus, cabaret … in search of total performance. Other renovating heritage listed European dramatists of the second half of the twentieth century, as Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater and strongly committed politically, Antonin Artaud (the theater of cruelty tried to bring to the stage some of the tenets of surrealism). The theater of the absurd S. Beckett and E. Ionesco, who staged without coherent argument works, featuring characters devoid of psychology, talking past each other in the midst of crazy scenarios with the intent to capture the scene in the meaninglessness of human existence, subject to unexpected and unexplained circumstances .
In the mid seventies the boiling stage is evident in the existence of 150 groups, non-commercial, amateur theaters, chamber, university and experimental theaters.
Among the independent theaters that were consolidated highlighted the TEI (Experimental Theater Independent Madrid). Others still remain active as Joglars Catalans and Andalusians Els Comediants or La Cuadra.
Along with theater groups can cite some avant-garde playwrights like Francisco Nieva and Fernando Arrabal, who from his exile in Paris, won with his provocative theater panic.