Alfonso Sastre is a somewhat incongruous figure in the practice of and critical literature on twentieth-century Spanish theatre in that his salience in academic writings on the topic is somewhat belied by his plays’ limited performance history. From the mid-1950s and into the 1990s, Sastre was held up as the premier oppositional dramatist of the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) alongside Antonio Buero Vallejo. Yet the reality is that few of his plays were staged professionally during this period, and no concerted attempt has been made to rescue his dramatic oeuvre for audiences in democratic Spain. Indeed, his plays of the last fifteen years of the Franco dictatorship strike the reader now as wilfully unperformable, made to impress those more disposed to value political dissent per se in…
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Citation: Green, Stuart. "Alfonso Sastre". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12888, accessed 24 November 2024.]
