Gwynne Edwards' 'Lorca: Living in the Theatre' (2003). Part II

Gwynne Edwards, Lorca: Living in the Theatre. London and Chicago: Peter Owen, 2003.

The Public / El público (1930) -- first professional production, 1987, Madrid: 

"[T]he effect was a remarkably ghostlike setting, the characters existing in some disembodied world, and this was further heightened by the angles of lighting, which often illuminated only the sides of faces or created elongated shadows -- a mysterious, haunting, inner world, the darkened corner of the mind's recesses" (page 57).

When Five Years Pass / Así que pasen cinco años (1931): "Lorca was, for a variety of reasons, highly conscious of the passing of time and the inevitable consequences of this" (page 68). 

"' A great hand's taken her. / It must be the hand of God. / Don't bury me!'" (page 72).

". . . Lorca's play is much more sophisticated and polished than the Buñuel-Dalí film [Un Chien andalou, 1929], however much praise has been lavished on the latter. It [When Five Years Pass] illustrates Lorca's notion of a work of art as a journey, in this case a journey from day-dream and fantasy to bitter disillusionment. And in that respect it also has a coherence and a sense of the author's controlling hand which is at odds with [André] Breton's definition of Surrealism as spontaneous expression, free from the control of reason" (page 75).

Quoting Jan Fairley on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival production of When Five Years Pass in 1989: "Friends and phantoms intermingle so that there is no distinction between reality and fantasy. We are drawn into a constantly shifting present which re-plays itself through the past" (pages 82-83).

Blood Wedding / Bodas de sangre (1931): 

". . . Lorca was acutely conscious, through personal experience and cultural background, that the individual finds himself in an uncomprehending universe and at the mercy of a hostile fate in the face of which his deepest aspirations come to nothing and very often prove to be the source of his own downfall.  His vision is, of course, pessimistic, suggesting a world without hope, but in that sense it is typical of the twentieth century and places Lorca firmly alongside such dramatists as [Eugene] O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Samuel Beckett" (page 112).   

Today's Rune: Initiation.

'The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí' (1942): Early In Spain

The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, translated into English by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Dial Press, 1942. Since reprinted by various publishers. 

Dalí's (1904-1989) innately bizarre way of seeing things is all here, but to my surprise, so is a consistent sort of Catholicism. There's a lot of depth in this book. Dalí was a strange person, and an interesting one.

Childhood and young adulthood are conjured in a way that feels accurate -- we tend to forget how precocious and weird children can be on the inside. Dalí remembers, maybe even with more than a touch of obsessive compulsion.

Dalí as a kid, not quite an adolescent:

 . . . I determined the methodical distribution of the events of my future days, for with my avidity for all things, resulting from my new and bubbling vitality, I felt that I needed a minimum of order so as not to destroy my enthusiasm in contradictory and simultaneous desires. For I now wanted to take frenzied advantage of everything all at once, to be everywhere at the same moment. I understood very quickly that with the disorder in which I went about wanting to enjoy and bite and touch everything I would in the end not be able to taste or savor anything at all and that the more I clutched at pleasure, attempting to profit by the gluttonous economy of a single gesture, the more this pleasure would slip and escape from my too avid hands.

And so he chose to adopt "a jesuitical and meticulous program . . . strictly and severely exacting." (Chapter Five: "True Childhood Memories.")  

And on he will go, to Madrid, and Paris and New York City, and eventually back to Spain, and even recently in the news. 

It'll take a few posts to complete the job.

Today's Rune: Flow.