IV - El público: Struggling with Identity

Summary

The ‘impossible’ drama: homosexuality, structure and style

In April 1936, just three months before he left Madrid for Granada for the last time, García Lorca was interviewed by Felipe Morales for the journal La Voz (OC VI: 728–33). Asked about his theatre, the poet designated his ‘primeras comedias’, in seemingly unequivocal terms, as ‘irrepresentables’ and ‘imposibles’ (OC VI: 731). With the first Spanish professional productions of Así que pasen cinco años, El público and Comedia sin título taking place in 1987 and 1989, respectively, what García Lorca once considered quite impossible to produce has now triumphed on the stage of his native land. However, the epithet of ‘impossible’ lives on. It has been mobilised and extended by a succession of critical voices to classify an entire section of García Lorca's theatre, including El público, and various dialogues such as ‘La doncella, el marinero y el estudiante’ and ‘El paseo de Buster Keaton’.

What is it, we might speculate, about these works that continues to qualify this theatre as impossible? I believe we can understand the classification by examining the one work which directors, critics and scholars alike regard as the most impossible: El público. The briefest perusal of critical studies of this play yields two clusters of concurring thought as to its impossibility. The first area of agreement concerns the play's subject; it seems the El público is impossible as it deals with ‘homosexuality’. The second site of critical attention is the challenging condition of provisionality in which the text hasreached us. This, when allied with the internal structure of the piece, renders its reading problematic and demanding.

Let us look at the first zone of impossibility: the theme. The eminent Welsh lorquista Gwynne Edwards is quite plain: ‘The Public deals with the theme of homosexuality, and does so in a particularly powerful and uncompromising way.’ Equally explicit is one editor of the Obras Completas, Miguel García-Posada: ‘La obra nos instala en un universo homosexual.’