The Comic Theatre

Abstract

Lorca undoubtedly began forming his impressions of comic theatre from a very early age, first as a spectator at the travelling puppet plays that came to his childhood home in Granada, then as a youthful imitator of these popular shows with family and friends as audiences, and continuing as he began to write his own theatrical works in Madrid. This popular theatre is important in all of Lorca’s work for the stage. Guillermo de Torre, one of Lorca’s friends from the early days in Granada, asserts that Lorca produced a number of farces based on the ‘cristobitas’, the Spanish guignol theatre (so-named after its most vivid stock figure, Don Cristóbal) and that these comic pieces were done even prior to his first drama written for performance in Madrid in 1920.¹ But these entertainments had no script and are therefore lost to us. In fact, all that remains from one of Lorca’s earliest scripted puppet shows (1923) is a programme and a snap-shot of the stage. The performance took place on the occasion of the Feast of the Three Wise Men, 4 January 1923, before an audience of children and their parents in the parlour of the García home.