Out of the Wings

Antonio Buero Vallejo

Personal information

Surname: Buero Vallejo
First name: Antonio
Born: 29 September 1916, Guadalajara, Spain
Died: 29 April 2000

Biography

Antonio Buero Vallejo (1916-2000) is widely considered to be the most important playwright of the Spanish Civil War. He was born in Guadalajara but moved to Madrid with his family in the 1930s where he studied art. However, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War interrupted his studies. His father was killed during the early stages of the war. Subsequently, Buero’s participation on the Republican side led him to be condemned to death after Franco came to power. This sentence was then reduced to life imprisonment. In the end, Buero spent nearly seven years in jail. After his release in 1946, Buero wrote his first major work, Historia de una escalera (Story of a Stairway), in 1949. This play established Buero as a playwright whose work, among other things, is both a reflection of, and a comment upon, Spanish society coming to terms with itself after the Civil War. During his career Buero was awarded many awards, including the National Theatre Prize on several occasions. He continued writing plays almost up until his death in 2000. His last complete work, the critically acclaimed Misión al pueblo desierto (Mission to the Deserted Village), was published in 1999.

Themes

Buero Vallejo’s plays are often described as tragedies with elements of hope in them. He is interested in exploring in his drama the ways in which individuals are constrained and impeded by their social circumstances. In the sense that he considers history and tragedy to be interlinked (Halsey 1988: 21), Buero’s plays frequently feature characters whose pasts tragically haunt them and prevent them from carrying out fulfilling lives in the present. Buero also problematises Spain’s past in his work so as to undermine and challenge the official, idealized, versions of Spanish history that were favoured by the regime in which he wrote (Halsey 1988: 20). In this way, his aim, like that of other dramatists such as Alfonso Sastre, was to ‘confront the spectators with their own history […] not to mourn lost virtues and values but to provoke an awareness of the errors of Spain, both past and present’ (Hasley 1988: 20).

Halsey, Martha T. 1988. ‘Dramatic Patterns in Three History Plays of Contemporary Spain’, Hispania, 71.1, 20-30

Style

Much of Buero’s work was written under Franco’s dictatorship, during which theatre (among other art forms) was subject to a large degree of censorship. This, in part, accounts for the symbolic nature of many of Buero’s plays. Through symbolism the playwright could make criticisms of Spanish society without coming to the attention of the censors. Many of Buero’s characters have physical defects, such as deafness and blindness. These afflictions have a symbolic resonance. For example, blindness in Buero’s plays can represent, among other things, characters’ moral turpitude, frailty, ignorance, or inability to move beyond their situations (see Gagen 1986). Music plays a significant part in a number of Buero’s plays. Victor Dixon explains how the use of music in Bueros’s drama is multifaceted, as it is employed:

to assist in the evocation of a period or place; to create or enhance an atmosphere or mood; to lend both emphasis and continuity, as a leitmotiv connected with particular persons or episodes; to provoke, perhaps, ‘inter-textual’ associations with the source of the music concerned; and above all to symbolize or reinforce emotions, ideas and themes. (Dixon 2005: 567)

As well as music, Buero uses sound and visual effects to draw the audience into his plays. These effects include the use of loud noises, or plunging the auditorium into darkness. These ‘immersion effects’ allow for a greater identification between audience and characters, in that spectators are offered an insight into the psychological states of characters on stage – sharing, for example, in their blindness (see Dixon 1980).

Dixon, Victor. 1980. ‘The “immersion-effect” in the Plays of Antonio Buero Vallejo’. In Themes in Drama 2: Drama and Mimesis, ed. James Redmond, pp. 113-37. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Dixon, Victor. 2005. ‘Music in the Later Dramatic Works of Antonio Buero Vallejo’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 82.3, 567-88
Gagen, Derek. 1986. ‘ "Veo mejor desde que he cegado": Blindness as a Dramatic Symbol in Buero Vallejo’, The Modern Language Review, 81.3, 633-45

Plays in the database

Useful reading and websites

Dixon, Victor and Johnston, David. 1996. In El teatro de Buero Vallejo: homenaje del hispanismo británico e irlandés. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press (in Spanish)
Dixon, Victor. 1980. ‘The “immersion-effect” in the Plays of Antonio Buero Vallejo’. In Themes in Drama 2: Drama and Mimesis, ed. James Redmond, pp. 113-37. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Dixon, Victor. 2007. ‘Music in the Life and Early Dramatic Works of Antonio Buero Vallejo’. In Spanish Film, Theatre and Literature in the Twentieth Century, eds. David George and John London, pp. 237-60. Cardiff, University of Wales Press
Doménech, Ricardo. 1993. El teatro de Buero Vallejo, 2nd edn. Madrid, Gredos (in Spanish)
Feijoo, Luis Iglesias. 1982. La trayectoria dramática de Antonio Buero Vallejo, Santiago de Compostela, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
Gagen, Derek. 1986. ‘ "Veo mejor desde que he cegado": Blindness as a Dramatic Symbol in Buero Vallejo’, The Modern Language Review, 81.3, 633-45
González-Cobos Dávila, Carmen. 1979. Antonio Buero Vallejo: el hombre y su obra. Salamanca, Universidad de Salamanca (in Spanish)
Paco, Mariano de and Díez de Revenga, Francisco Javier. 2001. Antonio Buero Vallejo: dramaturgo universal. Murcia, Cajamurcia (in Spanish)

Entry written by Gwynneth Dowling. Last updated on 5 October 2010.

Authors, Plays & Translators

Out of the Wings

Out of the Wings

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Antonio Buero Vallejo

Authors, Plays & Translators