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federico garcia lorca - play without a title

Lorca's Dark Play For His Dark Times

By ALAN RIDING

MADRID, July 4 -- In late 1935 or early 1936, with the clouds of civil conflict already stationed threateningly over Spain, Federico García Lorca gave vent to his own pent-up anger, frustration and despair by starting work on a play that he intended to call ''The Dream of Life.''

Whether the play was ever completed may never be known. The Civil War erupted in July 1936 and one month later, when he was only 38 years old, Spain's greatest 20th-century poet and playwright was executed by fascist forces in Granada. In the chaos that followed, many of his papers were lost.

More than 30 years later, a document identified by experts as the first act of this play was found and eventually published as ''Comedia sin Titulo'' (''A Play Without a Name). But with Franco still in power and the wounds of the Civil War unhealed, it was never performed.

Now, with democracy at last restored to Spain, the 30-minute fragment has been put on for the first time in a production that has enabled theatergoers to admire both the timeless quality of Lorca's work and the talent of one of the country's best young directors, Lluis Pasqual.

It Seems to Be Complete

''One has to wonder what would follow because it stands up so well on its own,'' Mr. Pasqual said of the fragment. ''It is unfinished, yet it seems to be complete. Perhaps Lorca planned it as a trilogy. There are also some indications that the second act would take place in Heaven.''

The play is set in a theater during a rehearsal for Shakespeare's ''Midsummer Night's Dream'' that is disrupted by a skirmish between leftist and rightist forces warming up for the larger conflict that followed. But it is also disrupted by a character identified as the Author who turns against his audience.

Premonitions of civil war therefore run strongly through the play, yet Lorca seemed no less obsessed with denouncing the mediocrity of Spanish theater, the smugness of its audiences and even his own contribution to this state of affairs. Threatening to tear down the walls of the theater, his voice as the Author has never been clearer.

''Lorca is obviously angry with himself, too,'' Mr. Pasqual said. ''He's writing this at the same time as he is writing 'The House of Bernardo Alba,' which along with 'Blood Wedding' was one of his more conventional rural tragedies. 'Bernardo Alba' was probably the last play he wrote, but he was full of doubts at the time.''

Surrealism and New York

According to Ian Gibson, whose biography, ''Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life,'' is to be published in the United States this fall by Pantheon, ''A Play Without a Name'' reflects the Surrealist influence of the artist Salvador Dali and the film maker Luis Bunuel, whom the playwright met in the early 1930's.

''It also comes out of his experience in New York in 1929 and 1930 when, for the first time in his life, he traveled outside Spain,'' Mr. Gibson explained. ''It was then that he saw the provincialism of Spanish theater, but it wasn't ready for anything different. He wrote 'The Public' in 1930, but it was never performed in his lifetime. No one understood it.'' Today, with the Civil War gradually being reduced to a historical tragedy that need no longer divide Spaniards, Mr. Pasqual has sought to emphasize those aspects of ''A Play Without A Name'' that remain topical, above all Lorca's attack on theater where, in the Author's words, reigns ''a terrible air of lies.''

Sharing the playwright's objective of disturbing his audience, Mr. Pasqual has added about 30 minutes of a rehearsal of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' to the beginning, not only to establish the characters who reappear in Lorca's play, but also to create the impression among his audience of an ordinary visit to the theater.

Late Doors and Odd Sounds

''I wanted to disorientate the audience,'' he explained. ''That's why we don't open the doors of the theater until the last minute so people already enter slightly irritated. Then there are lots of unexplained noises. We even switch off the air-conditioning halfway through. But I only use the words of Shakespeare and Lorca. I can't meddle with them.'' By the time the rehearsal gives way to the play, the lines between theater and reality are already blurred. With the theater's lights undimmed, actors placed within the audience then suddenly engage in debates and arguments with the Author, who is sitting at a director's table in the stalls.

At one point, the Author disappears mysteriously behind the stage for 17 seconds - long enough for the audience to start talking nervously, unknowingly participating in the play. During one performance, a woman in the audience shouted, ''They've gone and left us.'' In another, a woman even told one of the actors sitting beside her to stop interrupting.

As the Author and his actors, both on stage and in the audience, argue about truth in theater and life, the sound of gunfire and explosions abruptly introduces a Spain torn by real conflict. Then, as the fighting gets closer, the players assume political identities - a blue-shirted man climbs on stage and shoots a worker shouting revolutionary slogans in the audience - in a scene that seemed to proclaim the inevitability of civil war.

A Dusting for the Audience

The play - or the fragment - ends with the theater being destroyed by fire after being struck by a shell. And to reinforce Lorca's metaphor, Mr. Pasqual has chunks of plaster, curtains and wires tumbling dramatically onto the stage as the audience is covered in dust - in this case, at least, only talcum powder.

Mr. Pasqual's production has been hailed by Spanish critics, serving as an appropriate climax to his four years as director of the National Dramatic Center at the Maria Guerrero Theater here during which he also put on the first-ever performance of ''The Public'' and several other of Lorca's rarely seen late plays.

''I was born on June 5, the same day as Lorca,'' Mr. Pasqual noted. ''I'm also 38 years old, which he was when he died. In fact, I've been performing his plays around the same age as he wrote them. So, as you can see, Lorca has become something of an obsession. But now it's time for something different.''

[5 juli 1989 New York Times]

federico garcia lorca (1898-1936)

uit: bespreking (1998) van een aantal boeken over Lorca

Het is vandaag op de kop af honderd jaar geleden dat de Spaanse dichter en toneelschrijver Federico García Lorca geboren werd. Achtendertig jaar later, waarschijnlijk op 19 augustus 1936, een maand na het uitbreken van de burgeroorlog, stierf hij voor een francistisch vuurpeleton. Hij was toen al de beroemdste Spaanse dichter van deze eeuw en misschien zelfs van de hele Spaanse literatuurgeschiedenis.

Dat de militaire opstandelingen met zijn executie een enorme blunder begingen, moeten zij al snel hebben beseft. Lorca's dood werd het symbool van hun barbaarsheid en verleende de toch al bijna mythische dichter een nog grotere allure. Lorca was een alleskunner: een briljant causeur, een begaafd musicus, een tekenaar van formaat en op het eind van zijn leven ook een bezield politiek militant. Maar voor alles was hij de dichter van zijn geboortestreek Andalusië, waarvan hij de diepe melancholie bezong zonder in folklorisme te vervallen, en de grote vernieuwer van het Spaanse toneel, dat nog zuchtte onder de erfenis van hoogdravende romantiek en burgerlijk realisme.

lees verder

bron nrc-boeken

federico garcia lorca

ROMANCE VAN DE MAAN

Voor Conchita Garcia Lorca

Naar de smidse kwam de maan

met haar nardusrokken aan.

Het kindje kijkt haar, kijkt haar aan.

Het kindje staat haar aan te kijken.

In de bewogen lucht

schudt de maan haar armen

en toont ze, wulps en kil,

haar borsten van hard tin.

Vlucht maan, maan, maan.

Als de zigeuners kwamen,

maakten ze met je hart

witte kettingen en ringen.

Kindje, laat me dansen.

Wanneer de zigeuners komen,

zullen ze je met gesloten oogjes

op het aambeeld vinden.

Vlucht maan, maan, maan,

ik hoor hun paarden al.

Kindje, laat me, trap niet

op mijn gesteven wit.

Nader kwam de ruiter

roffelend de trom van de vlakte.

In de smidse houdt het kindje

zijn ogen gesloten.

Door de olijfgaard kwamen

de zigeuners, brons en droom.

Met geheven hoofden

en halfgesloten ogen.

Wat roept de nachtuil,

jee, wat roept hij in de boom!

Door de hemel gaat de maan

met een kindje aan haar hand.

In de smidse huilen

krijsend de zigeuners.

De wind waakt, waakt over haar.

De wind staat bij haar te waken.

Zie hier meer in het Nederlands vertaalde gedichten.

federico garcia lorca - comedia sin título (waarschijnlijk 1935)

Play Without a Title, or Untitled Play (Comedia sin título), is an unfinished experimental play by the Spanish twentieth-century modernist playwright Federico García Lorca. Lorca conceived the work as a three-act drama and had referred to it by the title The Dream of Life (echoing, perhaps, Calderón's classic Golden-Age comedy Life is a Dream), but he completed only the first act. Lorca's play was probably written in 1935, but remained unpublished until 1978; it received its Spanish-language première in 1989 at the Teatro María Guerrero in Madrid, in a production directed by Lluís Pasqual.

Gwynne Edwards, the English-language translator of the play, argues that it differs in important respects from many of Lorca's other works, insofar as it attempts a series of transgressions of the traditional boundary separating stage from auditorium. The play tackles "issues of class and ideological division, of intolerance and hatred, all of them acted out in a theatre where the actors are as much the audience as the audience the actors." Lorca's experiments in this direction echo the work of Pirandello (whose Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) attempted to stage a similar transgression), though Lorca develops the effect in a far more politically-orientated, almost Brechtian direction.

federico garcia lorca

van 7 t/m 21 november 2010 vindt in Utrecht Lorca in Nederland plaats.