Innovation and Experiment

Abstract

In 1936, Lorca referred to what he called his ‘early’ plays (As Soon As Five Years Go By and The Public) as ‘unperformable’. He added, however, that these plays did exemplify the kind of work he really wanted to do in the theatre (II, 1016). Both of these highly experimental ‘early’ plays, and the one-act fragment, Untitled Play (1935 or 1936), are statements in practice of some of Lorca’s most important insights into theatre as such, and are themselves explorations of the theatre’s capacity to operate on many different levels other than those of logical dramatic discourse and ‘realistic’ representation.