The Unknown Lorca: Dialogues, Dramatic Projects, Unfinished Plays & a Filmscript

by Federico García Lorca, John London (Editor)

From the inside cover:
The Printed Head, volume IV, number 1/2

Lorca's plays, such as Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba, are known to theatre audiences all over the Western world, but rarely has there been an author so misrepresented by an incomplete awareness of his writing. Lorca was murdered by Nationalist sympathisers at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil war in 1936 and it was fifty years before the vision he developed in his dialogues and unfinished projects was realized in the theatre or film.

These short pieces provide an alternative repertoire to Lorca's better known plays and many of them challenge the very definition of stage performance. At times, punctuation replaces speech, cinematic images become integral to stage directions and, in the surviving act of his revolutionary drama The Dream of Life, the theatre itself is destroyed.

These are the first translations of Lorca's theatrical work to be based on his manuscripts.

127 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5 1898; died near Granada, August 19 1936, García Lorca is one of Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poets and dramatists. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with Machado as one of the two greatest poets Spain has produced in the 20th century, and he is certainly Spain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know admittedly little about Lorca: I think my parents rented a barely-recalled historical drama based on him at some point, and I think I saw a production of the House of Barnada Alba (sp?) in college. So I had understandably no idea about the heavy surrealist-absurdist bent of much of his shorter work, which often seem to resemble what I imagine Daniil Kharms' plays might have been like. The high points are a couple longer ones near the end: a 1930 film script for what would have been a quintessential surrealist film had it been made, albeit now reading like borderline parody of various editing and double-exosure tics of the era, and then, the best, "The Dream of Life" the longest play here, wherein a distraught author takes the audience to task on the state of the real world they are at the theater avoiding, while various cast members of other plays wander in and out, the audience (plants therein, at least) revolts, and a revolution begins outside the theater. It sounds almost like it could have gone down like a much more urgent and significant stage version of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast.

[Aaron Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you didn't know that Lorca was very funny, you need to check out this collection of puppet plays, theatrical poems, unfinished plays, and dialogues by the author of The House of Bernarda Alba, Blood Wedding, and Yerma.

This collection contains 18 short pieces, some of which are really brilliant. One of my favorites is "Shadows," a juvenile play of Lorca's in which a group of shadows discuss reincarnation. There is a charming puppet play called "The Basil-watering Girl and the Prying Prince," that I loved. Lorca's filmscript A Trip to the Moon is a dada-esque, or perhaps surrealist exploration of mortality, physical infirmity, medicine, fish, and sex. It puts one in mind, immediately, of René Clair's Entr'acte for the Dada ballet Relâche or perhaps Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou.

Finally, there's the really brilliant first act of a play called The Dream of Life that functions as a avant-garde critique of the theatre. Inside the play itself, the author addresses the audience and calls for things to be more real: "Why do we always have to go to the theatre to see what happens onstage and not what's happening to us?" Written in the 1930s, The Dream of Life is therefore contemporary with more famous metatheatrical critiques of the theatre by Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Luigi Pirandello.