From historical memory to the ‘memory of the real’ in the theatre about Franco’s Dictatorship

Abstract

The memory and the theater’s engagement with civil war and the Franco dictatorship has been a constant in the Spanish theater since 1975. Present-day appearance on the Spanish stage is a consequence of the pact of silence that was established with the country`s transition to democracy after Franco’s death and the weakness of the state’s policies of historical memory. The purpose of this article is to analyze the formats and procedures of the theater of memory about the Franco era in the 21st century. Here, I propose a recategorization of this work, ranging from documentary fiction to an expression of the dramaturgies of the real. Towards that end I map a large body of work, including those by Laila Ripoll, José Ramón Fernández, Pilar G. Almansa, Esther Lázaro, La Tristura, Mercedes Herrero and Marta Galán. Such a wide sample may offer a more complete picture of the forms of memorialization that persist in the contemporary moment based on three axes, through which we observe the transition from ‘historical memory’ to what we conceptualize as ‘memory of the real’.