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).
". . . 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.
1 comment:
I've been trying to do some work on a play, which means I'm starting to learn about this area and realizing I know very little
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