La Trilogía de la memoria: un acercamiento al teatro de Laila Ripoll

Abstract

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of a large number of historical texts, documentaries and novels about the Francoist repression immediately after the Spanish Civil War. Contemporary Spanish theater was not exempt from this ongoing dialogue and recuperation of the Spanish national past, and the works of playwrights like Guillem Clua, Itziar Pascual, Gracia Morales and Alfredo Sanzol are a good example of it. Yet, because the theatrical response has not received as much critical and popular attention as novels or films, its contribution to the field of historical memory is often dismissed or viewed as secondary to that of other literary genres. The objective of this article is to propose a theoretical approach to the play writing of Laila Ripoll (Madrid 1964), one of the authors who, in her plays, has shown most interest in the subject of Historical Memory. I will focus on three of her major works of the theater of memory: Altra Bilis (2001), Los niños perdidos (2005) and Santa Perpetua (2011), recently published together under the title: Trilogía de la memoria (2013).