The Defense of Buero Vallejo

The Defense of Buero Vallejo WILLIAM GIULIANO • TODAY'S HEROES are sometimes tomorrow's villains, and unfortunately, to a limited extent, that is the unhappy lot of Antonio Buero Vallejo, 1 whose play Historia de una escalera (Story of a Staircase) in 1949 injected new life into the stagnant Spanish theater and inspired many young dramatists to write serious plays, directly or indirectly criticizing the political, social, and economic policies of Spain. A prisoner for six and a half years, under sentence of death for eight months, Buero was released in 1946 and soon after won the Lope de Vega prize for Historia de una escalera, which became an instant hit. Within several years, he and another outstanding young dramatist, Alfonso Sastre, became symbols of liberal opposition to the Franco regime. liberal opposition to the Franco regime. Unfortunately, the two playwrights became involved in a polemic which severed their friendship and paved the way for a gradual undermining of the reputation of Buero as a sincere exponent of Spanish liberalism. In 1960, Sastre accused Buero of "posibilismo," that is, of compromising his principles by disguising his liberal views so that his plays would be approved by the censors for performance.2 Buero replied that he opposed the "imposibilismo" suggested by Sastre, since this would render production impossible in Spain. He advocated boldness but rejected undue rashness, and he continued to write as before. Sastre had great difficulty in having his plays approved for performance and eventually stopped writing for the stage. In 1973 he was jailed as an accomplice in a bomb explosion but later was released on bail, probably because of international pressure brought to bear on 223 224 WILLIAM GIULIANO the Franco government. Buero, on' the other hand, although he had difficulty in securing licenses for his plays, was able to see all his plays but two (approved years later) passed by the censors. The youth of Spain in Buero's early years as a dramatist rallied behind him and Sastre as bulwarks of courageous resistance against a repressive political environment. The youth of twenty years later, however, began to lose faith in Buero, thinking, as Sastre had earlier, that he had capitulated to government censorship. He encountered disfavor not only ideologically but also esthetically. He was severely criticized for persisting to use a technique which gave him, as author, full control of the text, instead of permitting greater audience participation in the manner of the Living Theater. Although he had deliberately sought to involve the audience in his plays (as early as 1950 in En la ardiente oscuridad [In the Burning Darkness], the theater lights were completely extinguished for a moment to make the audience feel the darkness of the blind protagonist ), Buero refused to involve the audience actively. On seeing Orlando Furioso, directed by Luca Ronconi, Buer03 expressed his ideas on the performance. Ronconi inspired much action, he observed, but this was purely physical. Unless the spectator is spiritually as well as physically involved, such participation is purely illusive. In an interview two years later,4 Buero restated his opinion on spontaneous audience participation, declaring it sometimes counterproductive. He did not, however, object to the collective writing of a text. A text, he conceived , was necessary for the permanent preservation of artistic achievement. His own technique represented a striving for psychophysical participation emphasizing the spiritual, with elements of Brecht on one hand and Beckett on the other (Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt and Beckett's Theater of the Absurd). In 1970, after not having produced a play for three years, Buero presented the theater public with a drama that embodied the principles of audience participation as he had evolved them. The play, entitled EI sueno de la razon (The Sleep of Reasonp, which was not approved by the censors for five and a half months, is based on the life of Francisco de Goya at the age of seventy-six, when, refusing to accept the tyranny of Ferdinand VII, he retired to his country home and created the famous Black Paintings. Goya was deaf at this time, and Buero skilfully makes the audience see and feel everything through his eyes. When Goya is on the stage, the other characters...