The Republican Theatre During the Spanish Civil War: Rafael Alberti's Numancia

Abstract

The Spanish theatre in the twentieth century has often been criticized for its allegedly poor and unoriginal qualities, only Lorca and Valle-Inclán being widely accepted as dramatists who sought to revitalize the theatre of their day. The period of the Civil War, however, was a time when a number of writers, such as Max Aub, Miguel Hernández and Rafael Alberti, made important experiments with political theatre which are as yet largely unstudied. It is the aim of this article to redress the balance somewhat, by suggesting that the Civil War was not a disaster for the Spanish theatre but gave rise to radical innovations which have generally been neglected, such as Alberti's 1937 adaptation of Cervantes's tragedy El cerco de Numancia (c. 1580–7).