Spanish Golden Age theatre, notwithstanding its ubiquity in international histories of world theatre, has nevertheless had a patchier history of reception and performance in contemporary Spain than its canonical status might warrant. In his impeccably researched and documented study, Duncan Wheeler explores the extent to which perceptions of its contemporary invisibility or lack of relevance are justified, uncovering in the process an unprecedentedly wide-ranging history of comedia performance since 1939 (which he catalogues in Chapter 1). Using a variety of approaches drawn from performance studies, reception studies and film studies, alongside rigorous textual scholarship and attention to sociohistorical context, he sets out to uncover the reasons for the genre's ‘ghostly’ presence on the Spanish stage. His working hypothesis is that ‘Spain has had a tradition of performing the comedia but this has not translated into a performance tradition’ (p. 74).
The reasons for this failed translation are attributed in part to the excessive philological focus of Spanish approaches to their classical theatre canon, governed by the legacy of nineteenth-century literary historians like Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, whose readings of plays like Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep Well, discussed in detail in Chapter 2) and the wife-murder tragedies of Calderón (see Chapter 3) also limited the scope and acceptability of exploring more heterogeneous meanings in performance. Lope's play thus became virtually synonymous with the ‘essence of the Spanish national character’ (p. 78), whereas Calderón's ‘dramas of jealousy’ were condemned as morally aberrant (p. 107). This focus on the authority and transparency of the ‘page’ has also meant a general lack of attention to what happens in translation to the stage, which the scarcity of drama and theatre studies departments in twentieth-century Spanish universities has generally exacerbated. Indeed, the divorce between page and stage is one Wheeler continues to detect in the classical theatre festival held annually at the Manchegan town of Almagro, home to a beautifully reconstructed seventeenth-century corral. Having attended the 2008 edition of the annual conferences or jornadas held alongside the festival, he comments that he was disheartened to find that they ‘now operate as almost completely independent entities that happen to coincide . . . very few of the academic papers addressed performance and, beyond the opening ceremony and two specific sessions in which platitudes were exchanged, theatre practitioners were conspicuous by their absence’ (p. 4).
More decisive, for Wheeler, however, has been the way in which politics have governed the reception of the comedia, whether in the dominance of perceptions of the conservative political agenda of Golden Age drama outlined in the work of José Antonio Maravall and José María Díez Borque in the 1970s, or in the overt appropriation of Spain's classical canon by the Franco regime. Indeed, a key conclusion, supported by extensive evidence throughout this study, is that ‘[o]ne of the principal reasons that comedia performance never caught the modern-day popular imagination in Spain as it had in the seventeenth century was that it was staged not so much as art but as propaganda’ (p. 218). Earlier he argues that it was as much the Republican tradition of adapting comedias for contemporary audiences in the 1930s that fuelled Falangist and then Francoist campaigns to restore legitimate readings, thus setting the ‘faithful’ tone of productions in the 1940s and 1950s and also ultimately contributing to ensure perception of the aesthetic and political conservatism of the genre, which led certain plays to be considered almost unrecoverable. Indeed, the more open readings recorded by foreign scholars often continue to be considered erroneous, at the same time as the perceived superiority of other classical theatre performance traditions is used to question homegrown failings. One Spanish critic's response to the 2004 RSC staging of Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano (The Dog in the Manger) on tour in Madrid, for instance, refers to it being a success ‘in spite of the reservations one might have about Lope’, going on to repeat political and moral judgements about Golden Age theatre's inherent conservatism inherited from the past (p. 191). As Wheeler shows, such evaluations indicate an underlying mistrust of popular culture that neither allows for nor does justice to the more unexpected and indeterminate patterns of performance and reception he himself is committed to uncovering.
In order to interrogate and move beyond the series of false dichotomies – ‘fidelity/theatricality; archaeology/adaptation; respect/liberty; entertainment/solemnity’ – that have had such a stifling effect on the performance and reception of Golden Age theatre in contemporary Spain, Wheeler organizes his analysis around four illuminating case studies that allow him to scrutinize more closely the relationships between page and stage, actuality and theatricality, high and popular culture, that pertain in the performance and revival of classical plays (p. 192). Following the Chapter 1 overview of performance history between 1939 and 2009, he focuses on Fuente Ovejuna in Chapter 2, as one of the only plays, alongside El perro del hortelano (discussed in more detail in Chapter 4) to have hinted at the creation of a ‘performance tradition’. If the modern stage history of Lope's play allows us to chart the changing meanings of classical theatre in performance at the same time as we uncover its enduring theatrical force, in its carnivalesque set pieces, and its relationship with Spanish identity/-ies, then the focus in Chapter 3 is more about resistance to change, as exemplified in responses to revivals of Calderón's wife-murder plays, El médico de su honra and El pintor de su deshonra, and the trajectory of Spain's national classical theatre company, the CNTC, founded in 1986. Chapter 4 turns to the relationship between cinema and Golden Age drama, providing enlightening readings of a number of films, including Mario Camus's 1973 La leyenda del alcalde de Zalamea and Pilar Miró's 1996 El perro del hortelano, whilst at the same time drawing on film and media theory to interrogate reductive readings of mass culture. Finally, Chapter 5 turns on the relationship between local and global, using discussion of the RSC's Golden Age season in Madrid; the reception of Lope, Calderón and Tirso de Molina in Spain's autonomous regions; and the current standing of the Almagro International theatre festival, to locate Spanish classical theatre in relation to broader cultural currents, assessing ‘how the standings of Golden Age drama at home and abroad impact on each other’ (p. 189).
By bringing to bear such wide-ranging and diverse perspectives on the representation of Golden Age theatre in contemporary Spain, Wheeler not only presents an engaging and dynamic cultural history of the comedia in performance, but filters the trials and tribulations of modern Spanish history through the aspects these stagings provide. If the greatest strength of his study is in fact the sensitivity, enthusiasm and artistry with which he communicates the character and impact of particular performances, the way in which he brings them to life on the page, this is in itself a testimony to the power of his argument about the need to engage with ‘a spectral residue’ that ‘haunts both the past and the present’ (p. 218). For him, ‘there is a pressing need for the demystification of multiple symbolic layers that, paradoxically, requires memory and amnesia in equal measure’ (pp. 219–20).
