Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama: Reviving and Revising the Come by Laura Vidler

Abstract

Allen, John Jay. La piedra del teatro comercial europeo: El Teatro Cervantes de Alcala de Henares. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2015. 150 pp.This book is the latest contribution by John Jay Allen to our knowledge of the material conditions of Golden Age theater, a field in which he is the undisputed living expert and the importance of which it would be difficult to overestimate. Here Allen tells three stories. The first is about the discovery of a 1601 corral under the superimposed layers of an eighteenthcentury coliseum, a nineteenth-century romantic theater, and a twentiethcentury movie house, plus the effort by the three students who made the discovery to reconstruct it, with the assistance and direction of John Varey. The second is about the construction and structure of the corral, built by Francisco Sanchez, an illiterate carpenter, following the Corral de la Cruz, which he had seen in Madrid. The third reiterates Allen's previous work on the layout of corrales, with particular emphasis on their relationship to adjoining houses, and how this affected the staging of individual comedias such as La vida sueno and Fuenteovejuna.The first story is a saga with a sad ending. The struggles of the devoted students and John Varey, opposed or ignored by uncaring bureaucrats and ambitious politicians, were long and tortuous, in spite of the support of the international and national community of experts on Golden Age theater. After decades of disheartening failures the corral was restored, but not before the death of Varey, who never saw his labors come to fruition, nor was his personal library, which he had donated to the project, preserved at the site. The library ultimately was dispersed and lost, yet the theater is there, with its three incarnations restored, available for Spanish and foreign companies to stage classical and modern plays.Sanchez's construction of the corral is crucial, because this is the only remaining vestige of a historical Golden Age theater, and its rebuilding is a unique process on a European scale. Shakespeare's Globe in London burned down, as we know, so what we have is a replica built on the site following documents of the period. The stones on the patio of the corral in Alcala are the same ones on which Cervantes reports to have stood; hence, Rosetta Stone in the title of the book. The carpenter-whose illiteracy I question, for how could he have taken and preserved measurements?-followed the basic plan of the Madrid corrales, with the aposentos, cazuela, basic stage, bleachers on the side, patio for the mosqueteros, and, most importantly, ways to collect money from the spectators. …