Art Power and Governance the Cultural Politics of Spains Transition to Democracy
Transición by Alfonso Plou. Photo courtesy of Alfonso Plou
At the time of writing, Espana's principal gateway to the outside globe is being expensively re-branded equally the Adolfo Suárez-Madrid-Barajas Airdrome in accolade of the recently-deceased ex-President, the outset democratically-elected leader of the post-Franco period. This decision reveals the privileged place the Transition continues to perform in the collective imagination, while the controversy that has surrounded it—compounded past King Juan Carlos's subsequent abdication—is symptomatic of the absence of a shared narrative for what occurred during the dictatorship and its immediate backwash.
Transición (Transition), by Alfonso Plou and Julio Salvatierra, premiered by the Centro Dramático Nacional/National Dramatic Heart at the María Guerrero Theatre in Bound 2013. This meta-theatrical treatise on the personal and the political was written prior to these contempo landmark events, simply reflected the zeitgeist past which Spaniards are increasingly questioning the ostensible exemplarity of the passage from dictatorship to democracy. This country of diplomacy can exist attributed to the electric current economical crisis alongside the debates that crystallized around the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, designed to admit, but non compensate, the crimes committed against victims during both the Civil State of war (1936-39), and the near forty years of dictatorship that ensued (1939-1975). The legislation, introduced by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's Socialist regime (2004-2011), has been alternatively portrayed as an antidote to, or betrayal of, the so-called pacto de olvido ('pact of forgetting') or pacto de silencio ('pact of silence'), the preferred remedy of political elites during the Transition to a consensual monarchical democracy. These underlying problems are addressed in a production that depicts a fictionalized television contend on the Transition; and, in a second but more than dominant strand, the ruminations of a psychologically and physically infirm hospital patient, Adolfo, who may or may non be the former-President. The latter brings to mind similar scenes from The Atomic number 26 Lady (Phillipa Lloyd, 2011), a picture about Margaret Thatcher that I have always felt would accept worked better every bit a phase-play. The bandage of La Transición might non include anyone of the calibre of Meryl Streep, just the actors generally acquit themselves well, even if a rhetorical delivery, habitual in much Castilian theatre, tin can grate on occasion.
Trampa para pájaros by José Luis Alonso de Santos. Photo courtesy of Margarita Pinero
José Luis Alonso de Santos' Trampa para pájaros (A Play a joke on for Birds) features but 3 characters on stage and is especially reliant on the operation of the thespian cast as the chief protagonist, a policeman who struggles to come up to terms with the fact that the fierce authoritarian practices for which he was praised nether the Franco regime are now subject area to censure. This revival of a play originally written in the late 1980s and premiered in 1990 can exist attributed to both the fashion for narratives of the Transition and the attractions of a small cast at a time of financial crunch. This crisis has been felt particularly acutely in the theatre world where an exponential decrease in the disposable income of spectators has been compounded by the increase in VAT leveled past the incoming conservative government presided by Mariano Rajoy (2011-). The lead actor and managing director Juan Luis Magallares's tendency to communicate inner turmoil about exclusively through verbal and concrete agitation unfortunately eschews subtlety and nuance, while imbuing the production with an amateurish aesthetic that belies the near twenty-Euro ticket cost. This is exacerbated by the exigencies of an attractive but costly to maintain medium-sized Italianate theatre which, presumably in a desire to optimize profits, oftentimes hosts two different productions a night, thereby necessitating a hastily assembled fix with only brief attention paid to lighting or sound blueprint. The management of the Lara would have perhaps been meliorate brash to have tried to compensate some money at the bar through the introduction of what would, at least for this spectator, have been a very welcome interval break.
One arguably positive upshot of the recession is the increased collaboration between National Theatres and private companies; the Centro Dramático Nacional collaborated on Transición with iii contained companies (Fifty'Om-Imprebís, Teatro Meridional and Teatro del Temple) in a project which, co-ordinate to Julio Salvatierra's introduction to the printed play-text, emerged from workshops, run at the starting time of 2011. What could exist construed as a form of commonage authorship is reflected onstage. Adolfo maintains conversations with figures such as Santiago Carrillo or Male monarch Juan Carlos, widely considered to be principal architects of the Transition; while the opening scenario of a present-infused television debate makes constructive use of multi-media images by screening iconic clips from the menstruum, ranging from Prime number Minister Carlos Arias Navarro's bawling address to the nation on the occasion of General Franco's death to an infamous advertizement for Philips by actress and sex-symbol Carmen Sevilla. Much in the vein of Canciones para después de una guerra, Basilio Martín Patino'due south epochal 1976 cinematic documentary, the production showcases how archive footage can perform an affective Proustian office, and that the meaning of individuals' lives and socio-historical moments cannot be captured by reference to political milestones solitary.
Trampa para pájaros past José Luis Alonso de Santos. Photo courtesy of Margarita Pinero
In Alfonso Pou's introduction to the published version of the text, he effectively adopts an Aristotelian defence of the theatre by suggesting that its poetics tin reveal truths concealed by the rhetoric of (pseudo-) historical realities. Although sympathetic with this position, my major reservation as regards the production itself was that it was actually remarkably conservative in its evocation both of debates and footage. If, on the one hand, the meta-theatrical debates on such topics as to whether Carrillo was correct to make concessions to market-capitalism in lodge to permit the Spanish Communist Party a pale in forging the Constitution facilitated word, the ideas raised were very similar in kind to those regularly and repeatedly aired on real-life television or radio debates, as well every bit at Spanish dinner-tables throughout the Peninsula. Information technology was not, in fact, clear to me to whom the product was intended to appeal. For those versed in the relevant bug, at that place was little that was new and the running-fourth dimension of hundred minutes felt longer due to the labored nature of much of the dialogue; while a series of, admittedly oftentimes amusing, references and in-jokes (east.chiliad. to Santiago Carrillo'south donning a wig in order to move incognito effectually Madrid while embroiled in underground Communist struggle) or politically- and emotionally- charged songs by artists such as Nino Bravo, Raimón or Lluís Llach, (which practise not necessarily translate beyond either temporal or spatial borders) would, I imagine, leave the uninitiated thoroughly confused.
In a round-table argue on the play held on 3 Apr 2013, and organized by the Fundación de la Transición (The Transition Foundation)—an institution committed, in a oft hostile political landscape, to (re)vindicating the political and historical value of the key players in Spain's Transition—Jaime Lamo de Espinosa, a Government minister nether Suárez, employed Freudian psycho-assay to propose that the real-life Adolfo lost his memory as a effect of a melancholy provoked by the loss of political influence, personal losses with the death of his wife and girl, compounded past the tide of public opinion turning against him. While this reading is unlikely to withstand even the slightest historical or theoretical scrutiny, it is difficult to imagine any of the electric current generation of Spanish politicians engaging with a work of theatre from such an erudite starting point, however quixotic its exposition might prove to be. This is both the cause and outcome of the fact that the arts were both a privileged witness and participant in the Transition, with culture frequently becoming a not unproblematic byword for democratization. It is hardly a coincidence therefore that Alonso de Santos contrasts his brutish policeman with his brother, a celebrated and sybaritic musician; this exposition of fratricidal disharmonize—somewhat lazily signposted through the naming of the younger more than civilized brother as Abel—becomes a metaphor for the performative and arguably revisionist soapbox that surrounds 'the two Spain's': i Cosmic, conservative and inward-looking; the other, liberal, European and looking to the future.
In spite of this broad and dramatic political canvas, Alonso de Santos's dramatic composition is remarkably static and dialogue driven. While the choice of an cranium bedsit as a setting is a rather obvious metaphor for probing the collective and private unconscious, the narrative conceit was nevertheless innovative in being amongst the first to engage in any serious manner with the ongoing concrete and psychological effects of sociological Francoism. If, at the time of writing, it chimed with ongoing controversies surrounding the use of torture in secret state-orchestrated anti-terrorist squads, its major intervention is now with debates on to what extent the implicit and explicit political pacts of the late-1970s and early on-1980s should exist held to account for not appropriately or sufficiently burying the relics of the dictatorial past. Although a series of Mauro'due south extended set-pieces tin become tedious on occasions, the play is redeemed in role by 2 of Alonso de Santos's most recognizable and endearing traits: a tragicomic sense of sense of humour and a humane compassion for his dramatic creation, however base their personalities or condition.
Trampa para pájaros, Photo: Margarita Pinero
Alonso de Santos has always claimed that he has more in common with filmmakers, such equally Pedro Almodóvar and Woody Allen, who deftly imbue the prosaic with poetry while imbuing ostensibly eccentric or extreme situations with a naturalist veneer, than he does with his theatrical contemporaries in Spain, who take by and large opted for a more than overtly literary grade of accost. As a purveyor of the picaresque, his predilection for the underdog, is demonstrated by his sympathetic portrayal of drug-users and pretty criminals cast aside by an increasingly ruthless and mercantile earth in his 2 all-time-loved and almost commercially successful plays—Bajarse al moro (Going Down to Morocco, 1985) and La estanquera de Vallecas (The Tobacconist Woman from Vallecas,1981). The challenge he sets himself in Trampa para pájaros is to make the audition identify and sympathize with a policeman, besieged by his own colleagues, who is holding his wife and brother hostage after he has illegally tortured an innocent doubtable. At his best, this allows him to humorously navigate a complex moral terrain that is deceptively simple; at least in this performance, however, Trampa para pájaros frequently suffered from an excess of earnestness. The endeavour to garner sympathy with a torturer and disgraced policeman is a brave attempt to deconstruct the violence of the democratic state, but this ethical and aesthetic experiment was undermined past the fact that this defence was literally and laboriously delivered through a serial of badly-delivered soliloquies. In contrast, the audience was galvanized by the kind of humour that spectators acquaintance with Alonso de Santos'southward dramatic output. Particularly well received on the night I attended was Mauro's anecdote about the reluctance of a group of hippies to share their love with policeman, with 1 exception: an ugly immature woman with crabs affliction who consented to an orgy out of pure spite.
In spite of my reservations, in that location tin can be no denying that both productions were more often than not well-received. Although information technology was admittedly only granted a limited run, the Lara was filled to near-capacity for the performances of Trampa para pájaros and the actors received multiple curtain-calls, admitting generally more liberally awarded past Spanish than Anglo-America audiences. In addition to the ongoing popularity and productivity of Alonso de Santos—he is the but major living Spanish playwright to accept had all of his works staged—the play, despite beingness composed some ii decades previously, chimes particularly well with the current political and cultural zeitgeist. Similarly, El Mundo'due south cultural supplement included La Transición amongst the theatrical highlights of the year. This can, in part, be attributed to an attractive and minimalist, yet technologically astute, stage pattern inhabited by enthusiastic actors who actually came to life in a serial of song-and-dance numbers. Nevertheless, I suspect that the positive response was, more than mostly, predicated on a somewhat indiscriminate vogue for narratives relating to historical retention and the Transition. While pathologizing the pleasures of others is clearly a dangerous critical habit, I cannot help but remember that, in spite of some redeeming features, these largely pedestrian and derivative productions are of greater interest to social-historians than theatre connoisseurs.
is Associate Professor in Castilian Studies at the University of Leeds. He is Editor (Hispanic Studies) of "Modern Language Review" and his next book is titled "Art, Power and Governance: The Cultural Politics of Espana's Transition to Republic."
European Stages, vol. iii, no. 1 (Autumn 2014)
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Table of Contents:
• The 68th Avignon Festival 2014, July iv to 27: Protests and Performances by Philippa Wehle
• The Avignon Fringe Festival 2014 past Manuel García Martinez
• The Reality Bites of New Bulgarian Theatre past Dessy Gavroliva
• Happy Days: Enniskillen International Beckett Festival 2014, July 31-August 11 past Beate Hein Bennett
• Flemish Theatrical Exceptionalism By and large Glimmers, Sometimes Wavers by David Willinger
• Shouting at the Devil (and Everyone Else): Yaël Farber'south Production of The Crucible at The Former Vic by Erik Abbott
• Mladinsko Theatre and Oliver Frljić's Damned Be the Traitor of His Homeland! (Sibiu International Theatre Festival, Romania, 2014) by Ilinca Todoruţ
• Barcelona Theatre (2013): Responding to Kingdom of spain's Crisis past Maria Delgado
• Written report from Madrid by Duncan Wheeler
• Irish gaelic Colonial History on the Hungarian Stage by Mária Kurdi
• Fantastic Realities: Actors as Puppets and Puppets every bit Actors by Roy Kift
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