Spanish Post-War Theater: From 1940s to 1970s
Spanish Post-War Theater: From the 1940s to the 1970s
Post-War Theater (1940s-Mid 1950s)
A) Theater of Exiles
Alberti
His most important works are: Night of War in the Prado Museum (1956), in which the action takes place in the Prado Museum in November 1936, when Nationalist troops attacked Madrid; Clover Flower (1940); The Scarecrow (1944); and The Gallant (1945), which delves into the depths of the Spanish soul.
Pedro Salinas
Salinas’ work represents an intermediate stage between the theater of protest and elusive commercial theater, blending reality and fantasy. Some critics consider his work unclassifiable, as it is divided into two parts: romantic pieces like Sleeping Beauty, whose theme is love, and satirical pieces against exploitation.
B) Bourgeois Comedy (Jacinto Benavente Style)
This style is characterized by luxurious spaces, usually rooms, where characters from the bourgeoisie or middle class experience personal conflicts related to adultery, celibacy, nostalgia for the past, the generation gap, and the crisis of traditional values. The resolution of such conflicts, treated without great depth and from a sentimental perspective, always ends in a happy ending that strives to be morally exemplary.
The historical reality of the time, the working class, and social problems are excluded from Benavente’s comedy. The merit of this type of theater lies in the careful attention to language, which has a subtle humor and a caring irony. It is a well-crafted drama, but formally conventional and ideologically conservative. Benavente’s followers continued his work during the years of dictatorship and enjoyed the favor of theater owners and the public, mostly middle-class.
C) Comic Theater
Miguel Mihura
Mihura coincided with Enrique Jardiel Poncela in the improbable and the rejection of realism, anticipating what in the context of the European scene is called the theater of the absurd. He uses humor, imagination, and fantasy to reveal the authenticity of the world. He parodies and caricatures customs and fatalism that stifle life and diminish the dignity of human beings.
Miguel Mihura, along with Buero Vallejo and Federico García Lorca, belongs to the pre-war generation that renovated theater with his work Three Hats, written in 1932. However, it fits into the post-war theater since it was not released until 1952 because theater owners, directors, and actors did not dare to perform such an innovative play. Mihura was disappointed at not seeing his first play staged.
Stages in Mihura’s Work:
- 1932-1946: The works of this period lean towards the theater of the absurd and have a critical intention. The most representative work of this period is Three Hats.
- 1953-1968: After a hiatus in which he writes screenplays, he returns to the world of theater with works adapted to the tastes of the public, with easy humor and where plot and action are more important.
Social Reality and Theater (Mid-1950s to 1970s)
This period is characterized by its commitment to the immediate reality of Spanish society, whose situation it seeks to portray from a critical and political perspective, with the aim of showing the truth and intervening in Spanish life, moving the viewer to reflect and seek solutions. It reflects the violence and injustice of post-war Spain through social commentary. It evolved from existential drama to a theater of social witness.
The premiere of Historia de una escalera (Story of a Staircase) by Antonio Buero Vallejo (1949) marked a change in Spanish theater. Realistic drama was born, seeking to break with the trivial and conventional, creating a theater committed to the problems of Spain.
The premiere of Escuadra hacia la muerte (Squadron Towards Death) by Alfonso Sastre (1952), which presents the psychological tension of half a dozen men in a trench, consolidated this trend. Sastre, like other playwrights, saw theater as an instrument of revolutionary action rather than as an aesthetic object. He prioritized the social over the artistic.
These plays are a clear sign of a theater that wants to take a stand on stage to voice the concerns of the moment, breaking with conventional bourgeois comedies and their luxurious settings of escapism.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called realistic generation established a critical theater that sought an ethical and social commitment to the individual and reality. This was a new phase of theater oriented towards protest and denunciation, aiming to shake and transform Spanish society. Not all of these playwrights could openly stage their works.
Antonio Buero Vallejo (1916-2000)
Features of his tragedies:
- Delve into the characters, who are complex beings with the contradictions of human nature.
- The characters’ problems acquire a universal dimension when they are removed from their specific time and space. Although concerned with social problems, he never abandons the human and existential approach: the pursuit of happiness, truth, and freedom of the characters clashes with other characters or circumstances that prevent it. Within this framework, the use of symbols of the human condition (deafness, blindness, insanity, etc.) is essential.
- Always starts from a hopeful attitude, leaving the door open to human beings being capable of overcoming adversity through their own efforts.
- The viewer perceives reality just as the character does: the so-called immersion phenomenon.
- The theme revolves around the desire for human fulfillment and its painful limitations. The pursuit of happiness, truth, or freedom is hampered or frustrated by the concrete world in which man lives.
- Careful structuring of the plays and simple, unadorned language.
Buero Vallejo’s work can be classified into various stages.