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- Paloma Pedrero Díaz-Caneja
Paloma Pedrero Díaz-Caneja
- Personal information
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Surname: Pedrero Díaz-Caneja
First name: Paloma
Commonly known as: Paloma Pedrero
Born: 3 July 1957, Madrid, Spain
- Biography
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Paloma Pedrero (1957) is probably one of the best-known female playwrights writing in Spain today. Her plays are widely performed throughout the world and have been translated into many languages. In 1978 she helped establish the theatre company Cachivache, a collective of young writers interested in experimenting with realist forms of theatre. She started acting as a teenager and began writing successful plays in the 1980s. As well as writing theatre, Pedrero has directed and acted in her own work and has co-written film scripts. She has written numerous essays and given many conference papers on her work and the state of the contemporary Spanish theatre scene in general. Despite her popularity nationally and internationally, Pedrero’s criticisms about the way theatre is used and funded by those in power means that her work has been rejected time and again by public theatres such as Madrid’s Centro Dramático Nacional (Itzíar de Francisco 2001). Pedrero has also worked as an opinion columnist for the Spanish newspaper La Razón.
de Francisco, Itzíar. 2001. ‘Paloma Pedrero: "Algunos autores tenemos al poder en contra" ’, El Cultural, 5 November (in Spanish)
- Themes
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In her theatre, Paloma Pedrero explores the theme of love, often in the context of romantic relationships. She dramatises the (im)possibility of finding and maintaining true love, as well as the pain of falling out of love. In other plays the couples are not sexually or romantically linked, but rather are friends or family members. Through these non-romantic pairings she explores aspects of friendship and familial love. Pedrero’s work is often considered to be feminist in nature because of its focus on the problems of female characters. However Pedrero claims that her work is about human relationships in general: ‘the mystery of human relationships’ (Pepe Murrieta 2004). Although Pedrero’s plays often show how love can be painful, she sees it ultimately as a very humanising and life-affirming force (quoted in Carlos Galindo 1996).
Galindo, Carlos. 1996. ‘Paloma Pedrero: "Si no existiera el amor, todo sería muerte, máquinas..." ’, ABC, 9 April (in Spanish)
Murrieta, Pepe. 2004 ‘En Madrid, una Paloma’, October, http://www.cniae.cult.cu/PalomaP_entrevista.htm [accessed December 2009] (Online Publication) (in Spanish)
- Style
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Pedrero’s theatre is characterised by small casts of two or three people. She frequently dramatises conflicts between individuals, using humour and colloquial language to colour her work. Her plays are brief – sometimes no more than one extended act – and contain scenes of everyday life set in the home or urban spaces such as the street, the park or the bar.
- Plays in the database
- Useful reading and websites
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de Francisco, Itzíar. 2001. ‘Paloma Pedrero: "Algunos autores tenemos al poder en contra" ’, El Cultural, 5 November (in Spanish)
Interview with Paloma Pedrero.
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Galindo, Carlos. 1996. ‘Paloma Pedrero: "Si no existiera el amor, todo sería muerte, máquinas..." ’, ABC, 9 April (in Spanish)
Interview with Paloma Pedrero.
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Lamartina-Lens, Iride. 1991. ‘An Insight into the Theater of Paloma Pedrero’, Romance Languages Annual, 2, 465-8
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Lamartina-Lens, Iride. 1993. ‘Paloma Pedrero’. In Spanish Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, eds. Linda Gould Levine, Ellen Engelson Marson and Gloria Feiman Waldman, pp. 389-96. Westport, Greenwood Press
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Murrieta, Pepe. 2004 ‘En Madrid, una Paloma’, October, http://www.cniae.cult.cu/PalomaP_entrevista.htm [accessed December 2009] (Online Publication) (in Spanish)
Interview with Paloma Pedrero.
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Zatlin, Phyllis. 2001. ‘From Night Games to Postmodern Satire. The Theater of Paloma Pedrero’, Hispania, 84.2, 193-204
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Entry written by Gwynneth Dowling. Last updated on 13 October 2010.
