Spanish Theater: Early 20th Century Trends
Scheme:
- Traditional Theater:
- Poetic Drama
- Comic Theater
- Benavente Theater
- Innovative Theater:
- The Theater of ’98
- The Theater of ’27
Traditional Theater
During the first third of the twentieth century, two trends dominated the Spanish scene: traditional theater, aimed at a consumer audience, and innovative theater, with a relatively marginal influence on the overall theater scene. Traditional theater presented these aspects:
- A poetic drama of modernist trend, including authors such as Eduardo Marquina, Francisco Villaespesa, and the Machado brothers.
- A comic drama in which Charles Arniches, the creator of the genre, is the undisputed icon. His works, such as *The Sketches*, *The Girl’s Cat*, *What Does My Husband Do!*, etc., mixed costumbrist habits and emotional conflict within a populist idealization and language purism.
- Benavente theater, a realistic and restrained theater, in contrast to the neo-Romantic style of José Echegaray, who triumphed at the time. It represented the bourgeoisie from 1896, with premieres like *Known People*, until his last work, *Titania*, in 1946. It is characterized by the absence of serious conflicts and its mild social criticism. His masterpiece, *The Vested Interests*, diverges from the usual pattern.
The Innovative Theater
- Some writers of the Generation of ’98 made the first attempts to renew the ossified commercial theater. Among them were Unamuno, who considered drama a method of knowledge and created a few skeletal dramas, which he called “drumas” (*The Other* or *Brother Juan*); Joaquin Grau (*M. de Pygmalion*); and Azorín, who created an anti-realist theater devoid of tension. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who loved the media, clearly used cutting-edge techniques.
- The two great innovators of this era are Valle-Inclán and Lorca. Valle began writing plays in 1905, and for 20 years, it was his main occupation. For him, theater was a total spectacle, using cinematic techniques and constant experimentation. He was appalled at contemporary society in two ways: either through artful evasion or biting sarcasm. His plays can be classified as:
A) Art Nouveau: *The Marquis of Bradomín*.
B) Mythic Cycle: *Barbarous Comedies*, forces of evil and destruction throughout the free world. In *Divine Words*, the deployment of evil and the power of language announced the following cycle:
C) The Scarecrow: Characterized by distortion and sensationalism. A theater related to expressionism and the Dada movement. The most famous scarecrows are the first *Bohemian Lights* and those that make *Mardi Gras*.
D) Farces: In which the degradation of reality peaks, such as *Farce and Queen Castiza License*. Although authors such as Pedro Salinas, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernández, and Max Aub aimed at renewing the avant-garde theater, Lorca found a formula for theater renewal, quality, and public success.
In Lorca’s theater, there is a profound unity between drama and poetry, so each dramatic cycle corresponds to a poetic cycle.
In *Mariana Pineda*, we have a historical theme treated poetically.
Apart from some farcical works (*Loves of Don Perlimplín with Belisa in the Garden*), Lorca’s avant-garde theater consists of *So Spend Five Years*, with unnamed characters, as carriers of an idea of such complexity that it could not premiere until 1979. It is a meditation on time, the waste of what is offered, the fecundity of life, and the present face of infertility: sleep and tomorrow. *The Public*, an unfinished work, and the last discovered, *Comedy Untitled*, are also part of this avant-garde theater.
Rural Tragedies
Rural tragedies are the last step of Lorca’s theater, works in the social sense, where the longing for freedom, justice, and personal fulfillment collide with the rigid code of honor imposed on women. What Lorca called the “Trilogy of Spanish Life Drama” is composed of *Blood Wedding*, a collective tragedy; *Yerma*, an individual tragedy; and *The House of Bernarda Alba* (1936), his masterpiece. It is a drama of women in the villages of Spain, a world of silence, confined spaces, moral rigidity, and village gossip, where the instinct of power, as blind as the sexual instinct, overrides reality and represses.