Introduction

Summary

‘A complete creative artist, without whom it is impossible to understand contemporary Spanish theatre’.

By the end of the 1970s, Spanish theatre faced an uncertain future. The political crossroads that was the end of the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy was reflected in the theatre. The censorship with which playwrights had battled under the previous regime was no longer the challenge, and, in any case, the social realism that had been de rigueur in Spanish and Catalan playwriting of the 1960s and early 1970s was now out of fashion in international theatre. Collective creation was in vogue, and the performance art and street theatre that had developed during the 1960s in Europe and North America had, to an extent, supplanted text-based theatre.

By this time the collective ethos had taken root in Spain, especially in Catalonia, and such companies as San Francisco Mime Troupe and Théâtre du Soleil had their Catalan counterparts in internationally renowned performance groups, including Els Joglars and Comediants, while the performance group of the rock age, La Fura dels Baus, was about to break new boundaries and attract new audiences. Their world was far removed from the dominant mode of text-based theatre of the late Franco period. Els Joglars’ shows were as anti-Franco as the plays of social realists like Josep M. Benet i Jornet or Jordi Teixidor, but the idiom was radically different. Words were often replaced by mime, movement and, especially in the case of La Fura, music. Their early shows, performed in locations as varied as a morgue and a garage, were an assault on their audiences’ senses, and a world away from the well-made play in a proscenium-arch theatre.

The success of the groups went a long way towards ensuring that text-based Catalan theatre had been largely marginalised by the early 1970s. The realist idiom of the latter would have seemed passé to younger audiences, who found their desire for new theatrical forms satisfied in the performance groups, while the lack of a theatre infrastructure was another factor in this process. Catalan playwrights had laboured under a double handicap during the Franco years.