Spanish Theater until the Civil War

Posted on Sep 18, 2024 in Music

The Spanish Theater Until the Civil War

The Bourgeois Audience and Theatrical Trends

Prior to 1936, the direction of Spanish theater was heavily influenced by the tastes of a bourgeois audience seeking entertainment. Two main trends emerged:

  1. Commercially successful theater: This trend aimed to satisfy public demand with comedies, melodramas, and traditional dramatic forms, avoiding ideological themes.
  2. Renovating theater: This trend challenged the prevailing tastes by renewing forms and addressing contemporary issues. However, it took many years for this movement to gain widespread recognition.

Commercial Theater

Within the realm of commercial theater, three distinct streams can be identified:

a. Bourgeois Comedy

This genre reflected the vices and virtues of the bourgeois social class. Its main representative was Jacinto Benavente, with works like The Malquerida and Vested Interests.

b. Comic Theater

This category, often based on the depiction of customs and popular types, encompassed three varieties:

  • Theater of Manners: This style followed the tradition of farce, with prominent figures like Carlos Arniches and Serafín and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero.
  • Astrakhan: Created by Pedro Muñoz Seca, this genre relied on absurdities and blatant jokes, exemplified by Don Mendo’s Revenge.
  • Grotesque Comedy: This style combined tragic and comic elements, blending melodrama with caricature. Carlos Arniches’ Miss Trevélez is a notable example.

c. Poetic Drama

Written in a modernist style with an emphasis on sound and music, poetic drama emerged as a reaction against realistic drama. Its themes were often historical, focusing on significant events or figures from the past. Eduardo Marquina excelled in this genre, particularly with his historical drama in verse, Doña María la Brava.

Years later, the collaborative works of the brothers Manuel and Antonio Machado can also be considered within the realm of poetic theater. Their plays, aligned with the traditional aesthetics of the Spanish stage, achieved great success, including Desdichas de la Fortuna o Julianillo Valcárcel, Juan de Mañara, La Lola se va a los Puertos, and others.

The Renovation of the Theater

The renovation of Spanish theater was spearheaded by two prominent authors:

Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936)

Valle-Inclán created the technique of the grotesque, a distorted and caricatured vision of reality. His theatrical works are typically divided into five stages:

  • Cycle Nouveau (The Marquis of Bradomín)
  • Mythic Cycle, focusing on Galicia (Divine Words)
  • Cycle of Farce (Tablado’s Puppet Education of Princes)
  • Typical Cycle, based on an aesthetic of deformation (Bohemian Lights)
  • Final Cycle, featuring extreme dramatic proposals (Altarpiece of Greed, Lust, and Death)

Bohemian Lights is considered the first example of esperpento, a theatrical style characterized by the systematic distortion of reality. This deformation extends to the characters, who become grotesque beings treated like puppets or marionettes, as well as to the language and settings. The play depicts the nocturnal wanderings of the blind poet Max Estrella and his friend Don Latino through the underbelly of Madrid, offering a scathing critique of the prevailing political, economic, social, and cultural conditions in Spain at the time.

Federico García Lorca

Lorca transformed popular myths into tragic narratives. Apart from his farces and surrealist works, four plays stand out as central to his theatrical repertoire:

  • Mariana Pineda tells the story of a woman who sacrifices herself for liberal political ideals.
  • Blood Wedding is a tragedy of unbridled passion, exploring a love triangle that leads to love, hate, and death.
  • Yerma is a rural drama about a young and attractive but sterile woman who is driven to madness by her unfulfilled desire for motherhood and the lack of understanding from her husband.
  • The House of Bernarda Alba examines the themes of authority and freedom.

Other Notable Playwrights

Other significant writers of this period include:

  • Miguel de Unamuno: His plays, though not widely appreciated by the public, revisited his spiritual and philosophical concerns.
  • Azorín
  • Jacinto Grau: Author of The Lord of Pygmalion
  • Ramón Gómez de la Serna: Author of The Media Beings
  • Rafael Alberti: He wrote diverse plays, including avant-garde pieces like Man Uninhabited, political theater like From One Moment to Another and Night at the Prado Museum, and poetic theater like Clover Flower and The Eyesore.
  • Miguel Hernández (1910-1942): After writing a sacramental play, Who Has Seen and Who Sees You, he produced a work on social issues in verse, The Peasant of More Air.
  • Alejandro Casona (1903-1965): He premiered Mermaid Aground before the Civil War.
  • Enrique Jardiel Poncela (1901-1952): He represented a type of comic theater characterized by improbable situations and witty dialogues. His attempt to “renew laughter” through this approach foreshadowed certain aspects of the Theater of the Absurd. Before the war, he premiered A Spring Night Without Sleep (1927), You Have Eyes of a Femme Fatale (1933), Angelina or the Honor of a Brigadier (1933), and Four Hearts with Brake and Reverse (1936). After the war, in the 1940s, he continued writing and premiering successful works, including Eloise Is Under an Almond Tree (1940), which attempted to combine comedy with realistic situations and absurd fantasy, Thieves Are Honest People (1941), and The Inhabitants of the Empty House (1942).