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Reception and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre: 1939-1963

2000; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/474818

1553-0639

Bernardo Antonio González, John London,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre: 1939-1963. By John London. London: W. S. Maney and Son, 1967. 273 pages. The author's primary goal is to show how foreign theater was perceived in Spain in the period circumscribed by Franco's rise to power and Spain's social, economic, and cultural rebirth in the 1960s. Reception is measured by the critical reaction to key premieres of European and North American plays and by the influence of foreign theater on Spanish playwrights. Re newal is tagged to three new playwrights, Buero, Sastre, and Arrabal, whose emergence, one surmises, is conditioned to some degree by the context that foreign theater helped to create. The seven chapters contained herein seem to adhere conceptually to a tripartite organization: introduction, documentation, interpretation. In an initial chapter the author presents fundamental critical concepts, maps out his historical parameters, and outlines his method of approach. Foreign (Jauss) and national (Fernandez Cifuentes) critics are invoked as guides, yet their traces remain imperceptible in the interpretive practices of the four successive chapters, the second part of the book, where the descriptive prevails at the expense of the analytical. Drawing upon archival material, London documents therein the location, duration, and critical evaluation of performances categorized as follows: escapist (Coward, Maughm, De Filippo, Ustinov), religious and didactic (Priestley, Graham Greene, Georges Bernanos, Diego Fabbri), serious North-American (Wilder, Miller, Williams, O'Neill), and the Parisian avant-garde theater (Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett). From his random comparisons of the Spanish and foreign repertoires and critical responses, the reader is expected to extract a full-scale and original ideological portrait of Spanish society (the picture of an attitude which has not been established before). This portrait serves presumably as a backdrop in the third section for highlighting Buero, Sastre, and Arrabal's originality, the unstated examples of renewal in postwar Spanish theater. On a point by point analysis the study contains useful documentary and bibliographic information. Of special note are the numerous historical bookmarks that point to the history of social attitudes such as they intersect with theater practice in postwar Spain: the negative reaction to Ibsen in the 1940s (critical response at the turn of the century was positive), for instance, and the triumph of the anti-Fascist Diego Fabbri's Processo a Gesa in 1956 (his ideology would have been an impediment a decade earlier). …