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Beginning with a reassessment of the 1920s and 30s, this text looks beyond a consideration of just the most successful Spanish playwrights of the time, and discusses also the work of directors, theorists, actors and designers.
The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation’s past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, oftentimes opposing, ideological and aesthetic agendas. It follows the auto from the avant-garde stagings and rewritings of the form in the early twentieth century, to the Francoist productions by the Teatro Nacional de la Falange, to postmodern parodies of the form in the era following Franco’s death to demonstrate how twentieth-century Spanish dramatists use the auto in their reassessment of the nation’s political and artistic past, and as a way of envisioning its future.
English with excerpts in Spanish and French.
The essays in Talking Drama ask what the relation is between drama and its critics. In so far as we conceive of drama and theatre as arising from and providing some sense of social ritual and comment, drama is itself a critical genre, showing up the foibles and problems of human existence as well as the general hubris and errors of society. Plays both constitute criticism--of society, of ideas, of other plays--and deploy such self-critical gambits as plays within plays, characters who watch other characters, characters feigning roles and personalities, and even the overt inclusion of characters who are critics. Plays, thus, comment both on themselves and on the art of theatre generally. At the same time, drama implies other kinds of critics in the guise of the audience, reviewers, and those who might participate in its ideas. Just as plays produce the seeds of their own critique, so they also spur critique of their aesthetics, the artistry of their performance, and the ideas and conflicts they illustrate. Critics who review play performances are as much an intrinsic part of theatrical events as the audience and the plays themselves.
In Refiguring Spain, Marsha Kinder has gathered a collection of new essays that explore the central role played by film, television, newspapers, and art museums in redefining Spain's national/cultural identity and its position in the world economy during the post-Franco era. By emphasizing issues of historical recuperation, gender and sexuality, and the marketing of Spain's peaceful political transformation, the contributors demonstrate that Spanish cinema and other forms of Spanish media culture created new national stereotypes and strengthened the nation's place in the global market and on the global stage. These essays consider a diverse array of texts, ranging from recent films by AlmodÃ...
Theatre Worlds in Motion aims to clarify the different theatre traditions and practices in Western Europe from a historical and sociological perspective. The book grew out of a perceived need among theatre scholars who had recognised that, while they understood the theatre system of their own country, they often found it difficult to discover how it compared with other countries. The chapters analyse the basic components and dynamics of theatre systems in seventeen Western European nations in order to elucidate how the systems function in general and how they vary in different cultures. The book provides a sense of what has been happening recently in particular countries, and indicates how t...
The book constitutes the first attempt to provide an overview of the reception of foreign drama in Spain during the Franco dictatorship. John London analyses performance, stage design, translation, censorship, and critical reviews in relation to the works of many authors, including Noel Coward, Arthur Miller, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. He compares the original reception of these dramatists with the treatment they were given in Spain. However, his study is also a reassessment of the Spanish drama of the period. Dr London argues that only by tracing the reception of non-Spanish drama can we understand the praise lavished on playwrights such as Antonio Buero Vallejo and Alfonso Sastre, alongside the simultaneous rejection of Spanish avant-garde styles. A concluding reinterpretation of the early plays of Fernando Arrabal indicates the richness of an alternative route largely ignored in histories of Spanish theatre.
This bilingual anthology brings together a collection of Spanish entremeses, the comic interludes that were performed between the acts of a comedia. Penned by authors such as Lope de Rueda, Cervantes, Calderón, Quevedo, and Quiñones de Benavente, many of these plays appear here for the first time in English. Translated for performability, these plays create a panoramic view of one-act plays from Spain’s classical theater period. Presented with discussions of dramaturgical and performance possibilities and difficulties, including relevant historical, cultural, and social information for the plays, the collection opens with two precursors to the entremés, moves through the breadth of the ...
"The book contains a comprehensive introduction that describes Spanish theater in its Golden Age, what is known of the author’s life and times, contemporary stagings, and an extensive analysis of the text. The story unfolds as a cross between a jilted-lover scenario and a whodunit murder mystery. A woman laments her departed lover, a sister cross-dresses to avenge her murdered brother, a man duels with his cousin over lost honor, and before long, the dead man turns up as a ghost, or a bar maid, or a female peddler. Questions about identity abound in the witty El muerto disimulado / Presumed Dead. The transnational nature of this clever comedy complicates meanings, often producing bilingual wordplay that underscores the self-conscious, gender-bending, ludic character of the play and of theater in general."--