Spanish Theater Trends in the Early 20th Century
At the beginning of the 20th century, a predominant trend was realistic and naturalistic drama. This was the most commercial form of theater, intended to reflect the social reality of the moment. The characteristics of this stage are:
- Sets that give the viewer the illusion of reality.
- The actor must embody the character as if they were the same person.
- The viewer must forget they are in the theater.
During the first decades of this century, there was a constant renewal of performing trends, mainly due to the following causes:
- Application of different technical advances to theatrical performances.
- Influence of film.
- Importance of the director who, in many cases, ended up imposing their ideas.
Therefore, different refreshing theatrical trends appeared, such as symbolist theater, expressionist theater, the “epic theater” of Brecht, and the “theater of cruelty” of Artaud.
In Spain, the theater of the first third of the century is divided into commercial theater, which succeeded and reached a bourgeois audience, and innovative theater, bringing new techniques and ideological approaches.
Commercial Theater
Within commercial theater are:
- The comedy of Benavente: Benavente portrayed the upper classes with their hypocrisies and conventions. He proposed comedies such as Saturday Night and rural dramas such as The Unloved Woman.
- The verse drama: combined post-romanticism with modernist style. It had a highly conservative ideology, extolling the traditionalism of Spanish noble values and the great deeds of the past. Of particular importance were the Machado brothers, with works such as La Lola se va a los puertos.
- The comic theater: recreated popular social conventions. The main representatives are the Álvarez Quintero brothers, who tried to set emotional problems in Andalusia, such as El genio alegre.
Innovative Theater
On the other hand, the innovative theater differed:
- Valle-Inclán: We can divide his work into three stages:
- Aesthetic ideas: With an anti-bourgeois approach, Valle-Inclán criticized the society of his time. His theater was not represented because his arguments clashed with the prejudices of the bourgeois public.
- Transition to the nonsensical: Begins with Comedias bárbaras (Águila de blasón, Romance de lobos, and Cara de plata). Continues the line of rural Galicia, but now shown with strange characters, morons, violent and tyrannical.
- The grotesque: Divinas palabras, which refers to the Comedias bárbaras, is a violent drama developed in a sordid Galicia. All characters are deformed from the standpoint of social, moral, and even physical. Luces de bohemia defines the grotesque as the mixture of tragedy and burlesque. In the grotesque, reality is distorted, exaggerating the most objectionable features of it.
- Garcia Lorca: Lorca’s work could be summarized as the conflict between reality and desire. He hated the commercial theater of his time, he thought it lacked characters that show the conflicts of being human. Their sources are the rural drama theater of the 19th century, Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, the theater of the Spanish Golden Age, and the avant-garde.
- The beginning: In 1920, he wrote The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, a work that failed. Three years later, he wrote La niña que riega la albahaca y el príncipe preguntón, a piece that exposes children as a lost paradise. His first success came with Mariana Pineda (1925). This work, in verse, is about the conviction of a Grenadian for embroidering a liberal flag, and anti-dictatorship resonated against Primo de Rivera.
- The avant-garde experience: Following the publication of Gypsy Ballads and a subsequent trip to New York, Lorca underwent a personal crisis; he now bet on a surreal aesthetic. El público is a play where the characters symbolize the deepest psychic obsessions of Lorca: critical society and proclamation that all love is legal.
- Fullness: In 1933, Lorca left his Surrealist phase and started a new one at home with an avant-garde theater accessible to all audiences. The main theme is that of marginalized women in an intolerant society. For example, Blood Wedding tells the true story of a bride who runs away with her lover on her wedding day, breaking all social barriers. As a postscript, he wrote The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), the year of his death.
We also find other streams of renewal, such as the Generation of ’27, which meant a major renovation in the national drama for three purposes: to break with the commercial theater, bringing theater to the people, and incorporate new cutting-edge trends.