The Theatre of García Lorca

The Theatre of García Lorca offers radical new readings of his major plays, drawing on cultural studies, women’s and gay studies, psychoanalysis, and previously unexamined archival material. It provides fascinating historical accounts of productions in different times and places, from New York in the 1930s to Madrid in the 1980s. It also juxtaposes Lorca with major figures such as Gregorio Marañón, Langston Hughes, André Gide, and Lluis Pasqual, enabling us to see his theatre in a new light. In addition, the book presents a new psychoanalytic reading of the plays, which returns to Freud’s early clinical texts. Examining the complex and productive intersection of history and fantasy that is characteristic both of García Lorca’s theatre and of the cult to which it has given rise, this study offers a thorough reassessment of Lorca’s work.

• 1998 is the centenary of Lorca’s birth - will be the focus of conferences and media attention • Author is co-producing film documentary on Lorca for summer 1998 • Includes new archival and performance material (scripts, videos, theatrical ephemera, and popular biography) • The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca, a recent film about Garcia Lorca also explores many of these themes

Introduction; Text, performance, psychoanalysis; 1. Yerma and the doctors: García Lorca, Marañón, and the anxiety of bisexuality; 2. Black Wedding: García Lorca, Langston Hughes, and the translation of introjection; 3. Poet in Paris: Asi que pasen cinco anos (When Five Years Pass), Corydon, and the truth of anamnesis; 4. Garcia Lorca and the socialists: subsidised cinema, Pasqual’s public, and the identification of affect; Conclusion; ‘Doing Lorca’.