Acting has been variously defined as impersonating, imitating, interpreting, creating, feeling, radiating, being, behaving, or believing. Acting has even been defined as acting. In his book, The Actor's Ways and Means, Michael Redgrave states:

Established actors, needing no definition, may accept any misty generalization if they are not sure what it is they are doing. The student actor needs a definition to guide him in understanding the process at any specific moment in the performance. The least common denominator in the actor's performance is a single unit. This unit is compounded of a stimulus and a response.

It seems that tragedy is a kind of social sin. The average spectator considers the writer of tragedies, in the best cases, as a sort of sinister mar-joy worthy of criminal persecution, social ostracism and the most rigorous repression by the censors. It seems we are opposed to the voices of sorrow, death and catastrophe on the stage. Theatre managers illustrate this evident antipathy for the tragic genre by programming silly light comedies, and musical reviews whose artistic pretensions go no further than an exhibition of nude bodies, and saucy facility of situation, puns and jokes.

The capital discovery in the career of Alfonso Sastre was the fact that the theatre is a social act, and one which may have far-reaching consequences. The recognition of his role as a kind of social leaven places a heavy responsibility upon the dramatist, for he is capable of directing the thoughts and feelings of large sections of a population. Sastre, facing up squarely to this responsibility in a country where it is not always easy to do so, is producing what he calls a Theatre of Social Agitation whose fundamental theme is Revolution. It is not surprising to find that his plays have enjoyed few performances in Spain, where, however, Sastre is recognized as one of the outstanding young playwrights of today, and more than an author of promise. Of the ten full-length plays written before 1959, only five have been presented in Spain.

The Spanish theatre in the forties was in a far from promising condition. Garcia Lorca and Casona, who had revitalized the drama in the thirties, had disappeared from the scene. Benavente was still active, but his best work had been done before the Civil War, and his recent plays had little new to offer. The principal writers for the theatre were a group of playwrights who were already well established in the thirties, capable craftsmen such as Jardiel Poncela, Neville, Mihura, López Rubio, and Ruiz Iriarte, who wrote largely teatro de evasión—escapist literature. They sought to entertain the audience rather than to treat the anguishing problems of postwar Spain.