Catalan Theater: Pedrolo, Benet i Jornet – Freedom and Innovation
LOBR Liaison: Manuel de Pedrolo
Manuel de Pedrolo is one of the most prolific and diverse figures in contemporary Catalan literature. Pedrolo explored virtually all literary genres, addressing a variety of themes and employing diverse narrative techniques. His ambitious project demonstrates a willingness to engage with all genres and themes within the novel, and also reflects an effort to introduce technical innovations of the 20th century into Catalan narrative. He wrote detective novels (The Tail is Biting, Foul Play), science fiction (Mecanoscrit of Second Origin), and symbolic novels (All Beasts of Burden), and adopted different forms of realism in novels such as The Balance of the Morning.
Between 1958 and 1963, Manuel Pedrolo wrote a total of 13 plays focusing on the theme of freedom, analyzed from different angles, and employing formal and stylistic techniques that link them with so-called theater of the absurd. Pedrolo raised issues such as the Heideggerian concept of authenticity (under which one is more authentic the more unable one is to communicate with the outside world), reflected on the most genuine freedom from political, social, and philosophical perspectives, and explored the need for knowledge about the world. Emerging from a collective desire to expose a situation of repression in order to circumvent Franco’s censorship, he stripped dialogue of any reference that would enable the audience to locate the action: his pieces have neither geography nor history, avoiding anecdotal details and fleeing from reality. The characters are symbols that embody the author’s attitude facing limit situations, from an existentialist approach.
LOBR Liaison: Josep Maria Benet i Jornet
Josep Maria Benet i Jornet is a leading representative of a generation of playwrights that began with the JM Sagarra Prize for drama. These playwrights, including Rodolf Sirera, were young adults who had grown up during the Franco years. His early works, such as Old Scent of Dune (1963), which won the award, aligned with the precepts of historical realism, taking as references Bertolt Brecht, Buero Vallejo, and Salvador Espriu. This realistic theatrical base was gradually reformulated through formal experimentation during the seventies (Berenàveu in the Dark, Witches’ Revolt). With the publication of Desire (1991), a later phase of his dramatic production began. LOBR Liaison, along with Fleeting, configured a cycle in which, alongside a renewal of form, technique, and style, the author reflects on his most personal influences: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Thomas Bernhard. This change in orientation affects not only the issues but also specific aspects of theatrical aesthetics.
In addition to his published works, Benet addressed a child or youth audience, as in Fantasy and Supertot Workshop. In 1973, he also began a very prolific career as a creator of scripts for television series. Since then, Benet i Jornet has remained faithful to these two lines of writing—children’s theater and television—and continues to practice them parallel to what we might call his major dramatic work. In recent years, Benet has maintained his children’s theater and youth production, and has also expanded and diversified his production for television with new series such as People and Ventdelplà. Salamander (2005), one of his last published works, is one of the richest thematically.