Performing Spanishness: History, Cultural Identity and Censorship in the Theatre of José María Rodríguez Méndez (review)

There has been a significant body of work in English on censorship in Spanish theatre, including Patricia O’Connor’s ground-breaking articles during the 1960s, Marion Peter Holt’s landmark monograph, The Contemporary Spanish Theater (1949–1972), and, more recently, Catherine O’Leary’s 2005 study of censorship, The Theatre of Antonio Buero Vallejo: Ideology, Politics, and Censorship. Michael Thompson’s Performing Spanishness follows O’Leary’s structure in focusing on the work of a single dramatist. However, while O’Leary builds on the work of previous scholars of Buero—arguably Spain’s most lauded post–Civil War dramatist—negotiating his thorny relationship with the mechanism of Spanish censorship, Thompson approaches Rodríguez Méndez from a different perspective. Rodríguez Méndez has never received the extensive critical attention that Hispanists have bestowed on Buero, so there is a case to be made for rescuing him from academic oblivion. Thompson makes it persuasively by focusing on the ways in which the Catalan-born dramatist negotiates the paradigms of Spanishness in its multiple forms.

Thompson frames his discussion within the intersecting landscapes that the dramatist occupies. As such, Rodríguez Méndez is positioned as part of the so-called realist generation that offered the ravaged post–Civil War nation a cautious image of its own tortured self. Crucially, however, Thompson recognizes that Rodríguez Méndez’s language is too self-consciously theatrical, too playful and baroque to fit into the realist discourses promoted by Buero, and too interested in reaching a wide audience to follow the line of avant-garde artist Joan Brossa. There is something of the provocative ethos of Fernando Arrabal in Rodríguez Méndez, but this is tempered by his more benign sense of irony and wider interest in Spain’s indigenous cultural forms, such as zarzuela (popular operetta) and the sainete (often satirical one-act plays that evolved from Spain’s Golden Age). Flor de otoño (Autumn Flower) (1972), Rodríguez Méndez’s best-known play, negotiates a sleazy urban setting that appears to re-imagine Carlos Arniches’s portraits of early twentieth-century Madrid in the landscape of 1930s Barcelona. Like his earlier Bodas que fueron famosas del Pingajo y la Fandanga (The Great Day Pingajo and Fandanga Got Wed, 1965), it focuses on marginalized beings whose adventures and misadventures are charted through short, snappy scenes and a colloquial dialogue that owes something to the idiom of Ramón de la Cruz’s sainetes and zarzuelas

Thompson recognizes that any discussion of how Rodríguez Méndez uses these forms needs to be grounded in an overview of the emergence of Spanish nationalism, and how it consequently was appropriated by the particular political agenda of Francisco Franco. The emergence of nacionalcatolicismo is shown by Thompson to emerge from an otherwise “disparate coalition of forces that made up the families of Francoism” (29). Linked to the wider ideologies of españolismo and iberismo, we are shown how all were both promoted and interrogated through the cultural outputs of the Franco era. Thompson’s chapter 1 study of the political, social, cultural, and educational context that shaped Rodríguez Méndez’s work is a compact and valuable introduction to the Franco era and its ideological mechanisms, as well as to the changes wrought by the transition to democracy. By mapping effectively the triumphalism of Francoist nationalism, Thompson is able to indicate precisely what Rodríguez Méndez was reacting against and how his own cultural formation was marked by the impositions made on the Catalan language by Franco’s legislation. Thompson does not shy away from the reservations about Rodríguez Méndez’s plays voiced by critics such as José Monleón nor from the problematic defense of the concept of Spanishness that Rodríguez Méndez articulated. Neither is the...