La cuestión social en el teatro finisecular españolParadigmas de análisis

Abstract

By the end of the nineteenth century the theatre in Spain started a trend of social themes that was until then unknown. That orientation has been named as a «theatre of revolutionary tendency». On the one hand, there is a theatre with anarchist tendencies, characterized by its permanent desire for freedom, dealing with concepts such as proletarian internationalism or the attack on the bourgeoisie, from a new anarchist society (I. Iglesias, F. Cortiella). On the other, a theatre of socialist tendency, which focuses on social issues with a methodical vision and texts of difficult localization (amateur theatre). However, if we analyse the set of premieres on the Spanish stages at that time, there are a series of works that the critics called «social theatre», especially because of the selection of the characters, the space or the conflict they pose related to the sphere of the popular (Sellés, Dicenta). But could it be said that they really belong to the social theatre or to the anarchist one? To establish a paradigm of analysis, we first define what is conceptually understood by «the social» applied to dramaturgy. Secondly, we should not only refer to the text, but also to all the spatial-temporal factors external to the work itself (the decoding by the spectator audience, the theatrical direction, the actors, the reception of the work, the prevailing ideology, etc.) Finally, applying this paradigm and as an example, we analyse the «anarchist» trilogy of E. Sellés y Ángel.