Contemporary Playwriting and Manuel de Pedrolo’s Theater
Basic Features of Contemporary Playwriting
Modern theater is characterized by a return to the texts and a recovery of the author’s figure, after the stage performances that dominated the 1970s and 1980s. The support of institutions that emerged with democracy, and the expertise of veteran authors like Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, have favored the emergence of new artists, the most representative of whom began writing in the 1980s. They did so by abandoning the realism that had characterized the scene in the 1950s and 1960s. The influences on authors writing today include Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, and Thomas Bernhard. Their perspective is a critical or stylized vision of reality, based on a distant and depersonalized view.
Most new writers deal with individual themes (relationship crises, isolation, loneliness, illness, or aging), but also collective ones (violence, racism, or marginalization). The most significant names, due to their external projection, are Sergi Belbel and Lluïsa Cunillé, both authors born in the early 1960s. Veteran authors, such as Benet i Jornet or Rodolf Sirera, have diversified their writing, sometimes adapting to the audiovisual world. Television has become a platform to promote theater and publicize authors like the Valencian Carlos Alberola, in whose works humor is always present.
Manuel de Pedrolo’s Plays
The work of Manuel de Pedrolo is one of the most extensive and varied in contemporary Catalan literature. Pedrolo cultivated virtually all literary genres and worked with a variety of themes and techniques. The ambition of Pedrolo’s narrative project shows the desire to encompass all genres and themes within the novel, and also the effort to incorporate the technical innovations of 20th-century Catalan fiction. Thus, he wrote detective novels (*The Tail Bites Itself*, *Foul Play*), science fiction (*Typescript of the Second Origin*), and symbolic novels, such as *All the Beasts of Burden*. He also explored different forms of realism in novels such as *A Balance at Dawn*.
Between 1958 and 1963, Manuel de Pedrolo wrote a total of 13 plays focusing on the theme of freedom, analyzed from different angles. These plays share techniques, formal and stylistic elements that link them to the so-called theater of the absurd. Pedrolo raised issues such as the authenticity of man from a Heideggerian perspective (according to which man is more real the more he is unable to communicate with the outside world). He reflected on freedom from a more genuinely political and social standpoint, as well as philosophical aspects of knowledge of the world.
Arising from the need to expose a collective situation of repression while circumventing Franco’s censorship, his dialogues are stripped of any reference that would allow the action to be located: his pieces have neither geography nor history. Fleeing from anecdotal reality, the characters are symbols that embody the author’s attitude when facing extreme situations, from an existentialist approach.