Federico García Lorca

About the Book

Immortalized in death by The Clash, Pablo Neruda, Salvador Dalí, Dmitri Shostakovich and Lindsay Kemp, Federico García Lorca's spectre haunts both contemporary Spain and the cultural landscape beyond. Institutionalized as of one of the Spanish language's most resonant dramatists, his plays have functioned as a complex signifier of Spain on the international stage. This innovative study of his plays – ranging from his largely unknown early works to his rural trilogy, considers both their performance histories and the performance indicators encoded within the texts. In delineating how performance has affected the ways in which we approach Lorca's life as well as his work, this book considers the ways in which his short but eventful life has proved an enduring trope in reading his poetic and dramatic output. Covering a wide range of his plays, the study merges incisive textual analysis with performance histories that indicate the strategies used by directors when staging plays as formally and conceptually different as Blood Wedding and The Public. The book concludes by tracing the ways in which his life, death and poetry have been reconstructed through the performing and visual arts – in the poetry of his contemporaries, in the canvases of Dalí, in the laments of flamenco artists and rock icons like Camarón de la Isla, The Pogues, and The Clash. Both an introduction to his plays and their production histories and his status as a cultural icon, this study offers a fresh examination of one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century theatre.