Theatre Workshop and the Spanish Drama

Abstract

In the course of her long career as a director with Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop, Joan Littlewood staged some twenty foreign-language plays, of which three were Spanish: Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, and Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, while there were also plans to perform Lorca's Blood Wedding. Gwynne Edwards argues in this article that Littlewood's attraction to the Spanish plays was sometimes political but always due to a similarity in performance style which, influenced by the methods of leading European theatre practitioners, sought to integrate the elements of speech, stage design, movement, music, and lighting into a harmonious whole. Indeed, even though Lorca and Littlewood worked independently of each other, their ideas on the nature and function of theatre were very similar, while Lorca's touring company, La Barraca, employed methods very close to those of Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop. Gwynne Edwards was until recently Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca have been published by Methuen Drama, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays. Many of these have also had professional productions.