20th Century Spanish Theater: From Benavente to Lorca

20th Century Spanish Theater (1939)

Early 20th Century Dramatic Trends

The diverse landscape of Spanish drama before 1936 can be categorized as follows:

  • Late 19th Century: “High comedy” by Echegaray and his followers, melodramas emphasizing dramatic effects and intense scenes. Public taste and theater management hindered innovation.
  • Evolution of Dramatic Genres: Bourgeois comedy and farce (Madrid/Andalusian) evolved into forms like grotesque tragedy. Modernism rejected realism, embracing poetic and symbolic drama with idealized historical themes and verse.
  • Serious Renovation: Attempted by writers of the Generation of ’98.

Commercial Theater

Bourgeois Comedy

Jacinto Benavente, the leading figure, moved away from Echegaray’s bombast, focusing on dialogue, conversational tone, and realistic themes. His plays featured middle and upper-class characters with their typical conflicts (love, infidelity, hypocrisy). Works include Vested Interests, Lady Love, and The Malquerida (rural drama with themes of fate and passion).

Poetic or Verse Drama

Emerging from modernism, this escapist genre revived historical and legendary themes. Key figures include Eduardo Marquina (Daughters of the Cid, In Flanders, the Sun Has Set) and the Machado brothers (The Lola is Going to Ports).

Comedy Theater

Focused on entertainment, encompassing various forms like zarzuela and sketches (Carlos Arniches). Arniches portrayed Madrid’s characters and daily life, including grotesque tragedies addressing social issues (The Caciques, Miss Trevélez). Muñoz Seca’s Astrakhan plays featured wordplay and parodies (Don Mendo’s Revenge). The Álvarez Quintero brothers emphasized Andalusian themes.

Theater of Innovation: Valle-Inclán and García Lorca

The Generation of ’98

Authors like Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, and Jacinto Grau used theater to explore religious, existential, and social conflicts, creating intellectually complex works.

Valle-Inclán

and García Lorca

The theater of the authors of 98 .-

These authors (Unamuno, Azorín, Valle-Inclan and Jacinto Grau, especially) try to make a theater that will serve as a channel for expressing their religious conflicts, existential and social.
Make a theater complex intellectual and philosophical tendencies will connect with most refreshing and dramatic landscape of Western at the time.

Valle-Inclan.

His theatrical work is often grouped into three cycles:

a) The myth: The action takes place in a mythical Galicia, timeless: Comedy barbarian, divine words.
b) The farce: Works located in a more ‘ridiculous’, typical of the eighteenth century, gardens, roses, swans: The Marquesa Rosalinda, Farce and Queen castiza license.
c) The absurdity: Lights of Bohemia, (1920) and the trilogy “Mardi Gras.
The grotesque is an attempt to present the Spanish reality, but giving no real natural vision, but presenting the facts in an exaggerated and burlesque. We present a distorted reality, so that the viewer is surprised and become aware of it. The goal is similar to it, which later pursue Bertolt Brecht with his technique of “distancing.” Scenario is presented in unusual and surprising world, so that the viewer could relate to their own everyday reality and realize that this is also unusual.
The Theatre is a theater of absurdity critique of a false reality and values ​​that have no meaning.
BOHEMIA LIGHTS aesthetic eyesore starts. It tells the journey of Max Estrella and fellow Latino madrileña.Max Hispalis evening star, having been deprived of the opportunity to live badly to his family after being jailed, slapped, lost his dignity accept an arbitrary pension, dies of a leaning to the window to door and is betrayed and fleeced by his guide. Under the fictional characters are real people hide many of the era, but there are allusions to historical figures in his own name: Unamuno , Alfonso XIII, Pastora Imperio, Antonio Maura, Joselito.
THEATER IN THE GENERATION OF 27
While the authors of 98 and did little to get noucentistes favor with the public, in the 27 tried to create a new audience by bringing the theater to the people.
The outright rejection of the channels of commerce to any attempt to experimentation and limited interest of the public made ​​the most of the works not released. This is mostly experimental groups, whose productions and touring theatrical sought public education than usual.
Besides the figure of Federico García Lorca, stands as a playwright Alejandro Casona.
Alejandro Casona pedagogical vocation is present in his theater production of the republican years. Ex: Retablo Jovial. In exile he wrote several works, which were released first outside of Spain and then on him. Ex: The Lady of the Dawn, The Fisherman and The boat without standing trees die They are: Mixing fact and fantasy, some individual characters, a language unduly affected. As the theme of dreams, the place where the dreamers and fools believe that their fantasies are true and which must deal with reality.