Spanish Theater Evolution: Post-Civil War Drama (1940s–1970s)

Spanish Theater After the Civil War (Post-1939)

In the years immediately following the Civil War, the commercial theater lacked depth in depicting real human conflict, largely due to censorship, and presented no significant innovations. This theater of avoidance offered, at best, a superficial critique of hypocritical and selfish bourgeois mores.

The most innovative theater arrived in the form of works by Enrique Jardiel Poncela and Miguel Mihura. They wrote scenes of very clever and daring humor, which broke with traditional patterns through staging and highly imaginative absurdities.

Although Miguel Mihura wrote Tres sombreros de copa (Three Hats) in 1932, it was not staged until 1952. It addresses the conflict between the values of imagination and fantasy against the mediocrity of the bourgeois world.

Dramatic Renewal: The 1950s and 1960s

In the 1950s, Antonio Buero Vallejo, arguably the greatest Spanish playwright in decades, was unveiled with the play Historia de una escalera (1949). This work addresses the failure of illusions and the lack of critical horizons in a society full of despair, stubbornness, selfishness, and meanness.

Vallejo was an author committed to the ideals of justice and freedom. In the late '50s, when censorship began to relax, he posed in his works the conflict between these ideals and an oppressed society in which ideas and rights had been caged.

Key Works by Buero Vallejo (1960s)

• El concierto de San Ovidio (The Concert of Saint Ovidius, 1962) shows the exploitation suffered by the blind in Paris in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution.
• El tragaluz (The Skylight, 1967), considered one of his best works, addresses the conflict between idealism and a yearning for authenticity against the egoism of bourgeois society. His theatrical procedures announce formulas that are features of later Experimental theater.

Innovation and Symbolism: Spanish Theater in the 1970s

In the 1970s, Antonio Buero Vallejo renewed his theater, incorporating dramatic elements, the absurd, and symbolism from the Avant-Garde.

Buero Vallejo's Later Works

In La Fundación (The Foundation, 1974), he addresses the issue of man facing death. Five death row inmates are in conflict with their destiny, with others, and with themselves because of their situation. Their attitudes range from the resigned acceptance and guilty rebellion of four characters who accept reality, to the delusion of the youngest of all.

Francisco Nieva: Farce and Calamity

Another key author from this period is Francisco Nieva, whose work can be divided into two groups, which he calls the “theater of farce and calamity.” His theater is an imaginative and vital reaction in which language loses its logic and is loaded with symbolic expression.