20th Century Spanish Theater: From Benavente to Experimentalism

Posted on Sep 30, 2024 in Latin

20th Century Spanish Theater

Pre-Civil War Theater

Successful Theater

The Bourgeois Comedy

Also known as Benaventine comedy, named after Jacinto Benavente, Nobel Prize winner in 1922. This style catered to the bourgeoisie, portraying conflicts like infidelity and hypocrisy with sharp language and dramatic skill.

  • Content: Upper-class conflicts.
  • Style: Dramatic, witty, ironic (without challenging social order).
  • Works: “Special Interests,” “Lady Love,” “The Unloved.”
The Poetic Theater

Also called historical or modernist verse drama. Modernism emerges in the theater with varied verses, musicality, exotic settings, and rhetorical characters. Ideologically, it reacts against the Generation of ’98. Authors like Eduardo Marquina looked nostalgically at Spain’s imperial past (“Cid,” “Catholic Monarchs”) and rural settings (“The Shrine,” “Raise the River”).

The Comic Theater

Popularly preferred, including zarzuela, dinner theater, and farce. Carlos Arniches excelled in sketches with picturesque characters. The Álvarez Quintero brothers set plays in Andalusia, full of clichés and happy endings. Grotesque tragedy portrayed the poorest Spanish reality, including the closed environment of villages and caciques (“Miss Trevélez,” “Bosses”). The Astrakhan, a comic subgenre, parodied theatrical resources, with Muñoz Seca’s “The Revenge of Don Mendo” mocking modernist historical dramas.

Innovative Theater

Valle-Inclán and the Grotesque

Considered the most important Spanish dramatist of the 20th century. His early work aimed to overcome prevailing aesthetics and bourgeois conventions. From 1920, he developed “esperpentos,” satirizing society with degraded characters and tragicomic contrasts. Famous works include “Bohemian Lights,” “The Horns of Don Friolera,” and “The Captain’s Daughter.”

García Lorca and the Restoration of Tragedy

Initially influenced by modernist poetic theater, Lorca later focused on rural tragedy, characterized by:

  • Total spectacle: poetry, prose, folk elements, music.
  • Connection to the people through La Barraca, a university theater group.
  • Female protagonists driven by maternity (“Yerma”) or love (“Blood Wedding,” “The House of Bernarda Alba”).
  • Simple, poetic language full of symbols and metaphors.

Other innovators include Unamuno and Azorín (Generation of ’98), Ramón Gómez de la Serna (“The Beings are Mean”), and Alberti, Pedro Salinas, and Max Aub (Generation of ’27).

Post-Civil War Theater

Theater in Exile

With major authors dead or exiled, Spanish theater saw a slow, censored recovery. Exiled theater served as a reminder of Spain, with four main streams:

  1. Political theater (Alberti).
  2. Realistic theater, ranging from avant-garde social commitment (Max Aub) to intellectual existentialism (Pedro Salinas).
  3. Symbolist poetic drama (Alejandro Casona), featuring supernatural elements and unique characters (“The Suicide in Spring,” “The Queen of Dawn,” “There’s No Fisherman’s Boat”).
  4. Bourgeois drama, influenced by Benavente, focused on escapism and upper-middle-class conflicts with happy endings (José María Pemán, Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena, Joaquín Calvo Sotelo, Alfonso Paso).

Theater of Humor

While some humor was lighthearted (Alfonso Paso), others were more innovative:

  • Enrique Jardiel Poncela: Nonsense and absurd situations (“Four Hearts with Brake and Reverse,” “An Almond is Underneath Heloise”).
  • Miguel Mihura: Critical and innovative humor (“Three Top Hats”).
  • “Second Generation of ’27”: Edgar Neville (“The Dance”), José López Rubio.

Realistic and Committed Theater

Premiered in 1949 with Antonio Buero Vallejo’s “Story of a Staircase.” Two conflicting approaches emerged:

  1. Alfonso Sastre: Radical social theater, facing censorship (“Death in the Neighborhood,” “The Corner”).
  2. Buero Vallejo: Theater of the possible, subtly conveying messages through historical characters and situations. His works include realistic dramas (“Story of a Staircase”), historical dramas (“The Concert at Saint Ovid”), and symbolic works (“Goya’s Deafness,” “The Sleep of Reason”).

The “realistic generation” followed, including José Martín Recuerda, focusing on specific realities with simple, direct language.

Experimental Theater

Emerging in the late 1960s, experimental theater moved away from realism, aligning with international trends like epic theater (Bertolt Brecht), theater of the absurd (Ionesco and Beckett), theater of cruelty (Artaud), and independent theater. Spanish playwrights like Francisco Nieva and Fernando Arrabal combined tradition with foreign influences.

The Last Decades of the Spanish Stage

Characterized by diversity but few young authors, with realistic themes dominating. Notable figures include Fernando Fernán Gómez, Fermín Cabal, Antonio Gala, and theater groups like Els Joglars, La Fura dels Baus, and Dagoll Dagom.