The Catalan theater in Buenos Aires (1939-1975)

Abstract

There is probably no other city of Catalan economic migrants and political exiles in the world in which theatre flourished as much as it did in Buenos Aires. The love for theatre shown at the beginning of the twentieth century started to peak from 1939 when a large number of expatriates arrived in the city as a result of the war and the Franco dictatorship. The new generations, on the one hand, followed the footsteps of their predecessors with a clear preference for «classical» Catalan theatre (from Frederic Soler or Àngel Guimerà to Santiago Rusiñol and Josep Maria de Sagarra), but on the other brought a new taste to the thespian world with the incorporation of restorative voices which had sometimes scarcely been heard in Catalonia (Xavier Benguerel, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, Salvador Espriu, Joan Oliver and Manuel de Pedrolo). This was not only a question of presenting cultural pieces (and, in doing so assuaging public nostalgia) but also of offering patriotic works and minimally compensating for the limits that the Franco regime had imposed on the country.