Popular Army, Popular Theater: Spanish Agitprop during the Civil War, 1936-1939

The Spanish Civil War stands alone in leftist historical memory as the great twentieth-century battle between Communism and Fascism, between what could have been and what was. Aside from the countless memoirs, which recall every moment of those three years with tremendous precision and sweet nostalgia, an impressive body of scholarly literature has approached the subject from many angles, and most aspects of the war have been subject to wildly conflicting interpretations. Yet the many scholarly accounts describing and analyzing the Spanish Civil War diminish and neglect the importance of cultural activism to the Republican effort. The Spanish popular theater movement appears in these works only as associated with Federico García Lorca, who directed a traveling university theater troupe in the early 1930s.

There was, however, a theater movement of great historical significance. On August 22, 1937, as the war raged, the Spanish Second Republic's Ministry of Public Instruction (MPI)--one of the two ministries held by Communists during most of the war--founded a National Theater Council. Four months later, the same ministry added a guerrilla theater division to the council's operations. For two years, the council waged war with its particular brand of agitational propaganda and laid the foundations for a proletarian theater of the future. Franco's victory interrupted the work of the council, and its member artists fled to Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

The agitational plays produced by the council, read within their historical context, offer insight into working-class life in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War; into the process of creating art as a weapon; and into the birth of a fiery theatrical movement that was quickly extinguished and forgotten.

For two centuries, popular political theaters sprang up to help revolutionary movements overthrow oppressive regimes. In France after 1789, as theater historian Frederick Brown writes, "theaters multiplied, as though all society were being resolved into theater."¹ In Russia after 1917, thousands of workers' theaters reenacted revolutionary events, spread support for the Bolshevik cause, and dramatized the tremendous changes in workers' lives. In the 1930s, didactic agitprop theaters fomented Communist revolution among popular audiences trapped in collapsed depression economies across Europe and the United States.

In Spain, by contrast, a popular political theater emerged in the beginning of the civil war to prevent the besieged state from being overthrown. Fascism threatened both culture and democracy, and its defeat was the primary interest of both the left-wing theater in Madrid and the Republican state. Rather than inciting the proletariat to storm the palace and kill the czar, the Spanish agitational theater during the Civil War asked them to enlist in the popular Republican army and defend the Popular Front government they had recently elected.

The National Theater Council described itself as a "truly national theater,"² but it represented only Madrid's Communist theater movement--to the exclusion of both the collectivized anarchist theater industry in Barcelona and the commercial theater in Madrid. The MPI staffed it exclusively with members of a small group of Madrid intellectuals whose sympathies lay with the Communist Party and whose artistic and political ideas had been influenced by visits to the Soviet Union. Given the often duplicitous strategies employed by the Communist Party to gain power in many arenas during the war, the question arises whether the exclusion of other leftist factions within the council reflects complicity with party tactics on the part of its member artists. Whatever its relationship to the party, however, the National Theater Council served a larger purpose: it sustained and fostered the new Spanish political popular theater for the remaining two years of the war.

Between 1808 and 1931, in Spain's predemocratic "modern" period, the country endured domestic and international conflict, military coups, and loss of empire. Except for a two-year interregnum in the 1870s, Spain was ruled by monarchs and dictators who inhibited the education, politicization...