Lorca's El sueño de la vida: Metatheatrical Subversion, Social Concern, and the Audience's Experience

Abstract

Lorca's El sueño de la vida:Metatheatrical Subversion, Social Concern, and the Audience's Experience Andrew A. Anderson The single extant Act I of El sueño de la vida (1935–1936) combines socio-political concerns, expressed more explicitly here than Lorca had ever done before, with experiments in metatheatre that are in some senses more extreme than those found in any of his previous plays. Metatheatrical features include a broken fourth wall, "plants" in the audience, actors who lapse in and out of character or change character, powerful sound effects emanating from outside the auditorium, and reported events occurring off stage that finally engulf the theatre at the end of the act. At the same time, the work's themes involve social inequality and injustice, radical politics (left and right), religion, and the pressing need for major economic and cultural change. These two distinct threads intertwine in the idea of revolution and in the relation of the theatre with, and impact on, real life that is envisaged and advocated by the text. While previous criticism has rightly stressed the play's many unusual features, it has not fully recognized the many odd occurrences, uncertainties, and internal inconsistencies that permeate the script and hence serve to subvert any univocal interpretations.1 In turn, this underlying and pervasive ambiguity creates an unsettling effect that is ultimately disruptive of the status quo. The action takes place inside a theatre, extending to both the stage and the auditorium, meaning that, in any given production, the performance space as well as the area where the audience is seated function simultaneously as the overall setting where the scenes of the play unfold. This fact alone blurs, indeed almost obliterates, the distinction between the real and the fictional, creating an effect highly reminiscent of Tamayo y Baus's Un drama nuevo. There, similarly, in the second part of Act III, [End Page 129] the nineteenth-century Madrid theatre serves imaginatively as the space where the Elizabethan-era tragedy is performed, and the Spanish audience passively plays the part of the groundlings watching it, creating a confusion that is only partly clarified by the character of Shakespeare in his closing speech. In the case of El sueño de la vida, the basic circumstances surrounding the action are even less clear. There are two plausible possibilities, though neither serves to integrate and explain all the details that we eventually encounter. The first scenario that can be imagined is that the audience has gone to see a performance of a more or less conventional play, one whose title is never revealed.2 However, the Autor hijacks that day's performance and, improvising, turns it into something completely different. Consequently, the audience's expectations are unfulfilled, as is conveyed in some of the comments made early on by the married couple Espectador 1.º and Espectadora 1.ª (Lorca 139–43). The second is that this would be the opening night of a new play about which very little is known in advance. Again, the audience members attend the premiere with their usual expectations of being entertained but are confounded when they encounter an entirely disconcerting presentation that breaks almost all the prevailing theatrical norms, and which has been carefully planned out in advance by the Autor. No curtain rises at the beginning of the play. Rather the Autor comes out on stage with a "Telón gris" (137) behind him. One might reasonably assume that this was the front or house curtain —"No voy a levantar el telón"— (137), but subsequent stage directions cast doubt on this. At different points three painted curtains are lowered; all of them appear to be backdrops, and the third is specifically identified as such (139; 149; "telón de fondo," 153; cf. also the reference to "telones pintados," 149). Either the draft manuscript is lacking the indication for the grey curtain to be raised (though it is unclear what would be the appropriate moment for this to happen), or else it needs to be imagined as situated considerably further back in the stage space, to allow for these three curtains to cover it and each other in turn. The Autor...