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ABSTRACT
This article seeks to reconstruct and explore the initial theatrical reception of Lorca in the UK, focusing on why and how his texts entered the British theatrical ecosystem, and how they created connections among artists in and beyond Britain. This exploration of a largely ignored archive of the past also opens new gates for future theoretical reflections surrounding the complex symbolic weight of the author and his work. This, in turn, offers an insightful case study for analysing the role of theatre in forging national imaginaries and creating cultural exchange between artists of different countries in the tumultuous decades of pre and post-Second World War, a period of crisis of national/European imaginaries and realignment of global geopolitical powers that in many ways mirrors our post Brexit COVID 19 present.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See, for instance, Walsh (Citation2020), and Mayhew (Citation2018).
2. Edwards (see Citation2005; and the introductions to his editions of The House of Bernarda Alba and Blood Wedding [García Lorca Citation1998, xlviii-lii; and Citation2006, xlii-xlvii]) and Delgado (Citation2008) are two important examples of scholars that have recently worked on the performance of García Lorca in the UK.
3. An Orientalization of the author and his works with many points in common to the early reception of García Lorca in the US. The latter has recently been studied, although mainly through translations, by scholars such as Scaramella (Citation2017).
4. For more on the idea of Spain as a place considered fit for reinventing the continent within a Europeanizing modernist movement during the interwar period see Rogers (Citation2012).
5. The Abbey hosted productions of The Two Shepards (1924), Kingdom of God (1924) and Poor John (1926), probably as part of the activities of Yeats’ Dublin Drama League, which also performed Benavente’s The Passion Flower (La Malquerida) in 1924. We ought not to forget that the Spanish playwright received the Nobel Prize in 1922, just one year before Yeats.
6. See also Gagen (Citation2001).
7. Langdon-Davis had visited and lived in Catalunya several times during the 1920s and after the outbreak of the war he became a war correspondent for the liberal (and pro-Republican) Daily Chronicle. He was also one of the founders in 1937 of Plan International, by then a humanitarian institution that sought to provide asylum in Britain for Spanish children. Probably as a result of the aforementioned copyright problems, his translation was reworking of José Weissberger’s English translation (The Stage Citation1939, 4), the only one to be staged before Lorca’s death (Delgado Citation2008, 79–80).
8. In fact, when Blood Wedding was adapted for opera in the 1950s, frequent comparisons were made with Cavalleria rusticana.
9. This appreciation may be the result of the translation, which according to a non-very flattering letter (probably from the actor Stephen Haggard) contained ‘pseudo Irish turns of phrase’ introduced ‘to make the dialogue “paysan”’. See the archive Michel Saint-Denis of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, box 4-COL-83/509 (4).
10. See Programme of ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ (1951).
11. The Love of Don Perlimplin was banned in February 1929 after the opening night in Madrid by the Primo de Rivera regime and, as Lorca would say in a letter to his family from New York later that same year, his friends in the US were trying to perform it in the more avant-garde American stage (García Lorca Citation1997, 658). According to Mildred Adams ’s (Citation1977, 144 and 146), Lorca asked her later that same year to translate the play, which she attempted with no success.
12. Programme of Theatre Workshop. Edwards (Citation2007, 304–316) has recently written on Littlewood attraction to Spanish Drama, although I don’t agree with his assertion that Lorca’s production of Fuente Ovejuna was unknown to the director (309). Announcing Littlewood’s production of the classic in 1937, an article in The Times mentions precisely Lorca’s Fuente Ovejuna. Furthermore, the awareness of this previous Lorca’s production probably was one of the reasons that prompted Littlewood to resuscitate it in Britain, as Nadine Holdsworth (Citation2011, 43) suggests. Another, perhaps main, reason for this choice was the fact that it was a play largely performed in Russia since the 1876 and very popular in the Soviet country during the Spanish Civil War (see Ryjik Citation2011, 125–141.).
13. Behind these initial plans to perform Lorca could have been, again, Michel Saint-Denis, who was teaching Stage Production at the Unity Theatre Society drama School (Chambers Citation1989, 251).
14. Both plays were in the 1941 O’Connel and Graham-Luján’s collection translated into English (García Lorca Citation1941). They will be staged again only in the 1990s in the versions of Ragazzi Theatre and Absolute Theatre, and in Etcetera Theatre.
15. That same year the Berliner made his first visit to Britain, a visit that would leave an important mark on the development of British Theatre.
16. Four years later the group will find a permanent home in Leatherhead Victoria Hall, becoming the Leatherhead Theatre Club, one of the many repertory regional subsidized theatres that flourish after the war under the support of the newly created Arts Council. For an updated introduction to public support to theatre industry after the war and its catastrophic long-lasting effects in regional theatres see Olivia Turnbull (Citation2008).
17. It was also the version used in the American premiere of the play in 1951.
18. Withers have joined the Tavistock Repertory Company in 1937. In 1959 the amateur company decided to give its second chance to a new play that had been an authentic flop when presented the previous year at the Lyric, Hammersmith, on May 1958. That play was the Birthday Party, Harold Pinter second ‘incursion’ as a playwright (Walmsley Citation1999, 29).
19. The photos at the online Tower Archive show a stage design that follows Lorca’s indication and builds on a contrast between the white walls of an almost bare house and the black dresses. Available online at http://www.towertheatre.co/plays/1953/p5303.htm.
20. Withers probably also knew Arturo Barea, who since 1940 was working at the BBC Latin American Service.
21. In 1942 she has helped Austin Clarke and Roibeard O’ Farachain to direct drama in verse at the Dublin Verse Speaking Society, a precursor to the Lyric Theatre Company.
22. One year before, in March 1949, the company had performed O’Connell and Graham Lujan’s translation of Blood Wedding. And it is worthy to note that later that year an Irish performance of La Malquerida by Jacinto Benavente was seen in the main house of the Abbey Theatre (director Tomás Mac Anna).
23. Apart from representing Brecht in America, Bentley would in fact introduce Brecht in Italy in 1951, thanks to an invitation of Gianfranco De Bosio and the Teatro dell’Università di Padova (De Bosio Citation2016, 87). In 1950 he had also commissioned De Bosio a production of The Love of Don Perlimplín… at a festival linked to the Salzburg seminar in American Studies, apparently because he was ‘not able to invite a Spanish group’ to perform the play (Bentley Citation1992, 107).
24. It was, in any case, a complex discourse, as the response to Spanish Civil War in Irish newspapers shows (see McGarry Citation2002).
25. Another illuminating comment of Bentley on how Lorca was perceived among other European playwrights is to be found in his book on Brecht. After quoting a Thornton Wilder’s personal remark on how Lorca was less influential than Brecht but ‘better any day’ and recalling a similar opinion by the very same Eisler, Bentley (Citation2008, 403) asks himself if this was ‘a thought that haunted a whole generation.’
26. For the connection between the Abbey, Lyric Theatre and Lyric Players see O’Malley (Citation1988, 16–21); and Connolly (Citation2000, 45–46).
27. As a letter from the writer and film director Liam O’Leary, preserved at Austin Clarke Papers collection at the National Library of Ireland (reference: MS 38,665 /1) shows.
28. In February 1961 the Lyric Players also performed Gregorio Martínez Sierra’s The Kingdom of God.
29. In 1968 The Lyric Players attracted the patronage of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and become the first Northern Irish theatre ever to receive a subsidy. On the history of the Belfast Lyric Players see Connolly (Citation2000).
30. See box T4/13.
31. See box T4/29. As in Blood Wedding production Terence Flanagan was in charge of the decorative panels (Mary O’Malley Citation1990, 74).
32. In his memoires, Hall (Citation1993, 94) says to have felt attracted by ‘Lorca’s ability to mix surrealistic poetic theatre with concrete depiction of peasant life’, thus not discarding a literal reading (as a depiction of ‘peasant life’), but acknowledging the non-realistic, avant-garde, style.
33. See, for example, Hall’s obituary in The Guardian (Billington Citation2017).
34. The first British performance of Doña Rosita I could trace was Norwich Maddermarket Theatre 1955 production. The following year, students in the final term of Webber-Douglas School staged Yerma.