Do we go to the theatre to think or to feel? What is the purpose of this strange, ancient art, and what can it contribute to our understanding of human life?
El Público is a Surrealist play. It is written at the height of Federico García Lorca’s surrealist phase, concurrent with the great Poet in New York. Lorca, of course, was a contemporary of many important artists and intellectuals of his time. He engaged with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, and by embracing Surrealism thus engaged with the theories of Freud. It takes the ideas of the unconscious, reached through psychoanalytic techniques, and attempts to put them into an artistic context.
El Público is a play where, in the same way Dali would repeatedly paint eggs, the sea, bread, Lorca paints horses, the moon, masks. Lorca was writing a new theatre, a theatre no one had seen (and maybe still have not seen) before. The play is in large part, an argument for this new theatre, a theatre ‘debajo de la arena’ (beneath the sand), in which its players can express their true desires. Lorca’s desire, now obvious, was repressed throughout his entire life: a repression of his homosexual identity, which led to his exclusion from various literary and societal circles, including being renounced by the Surrealists themselves, and ultimately to his untimely death at the hands of Franco’s soldiers.
El Público is a play about theatre. Its language and stage-language is shocking and intense: strong, contradictory, and profoundly original. If naturalistic theatre is like Wagner, a complete work where each element works to construct a whole monument, Lorca is writing El Público like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It is constructed in sections, not whole. It is telling that my version, based on one I saw when very young in Peru, omits one of the scenes without much consequence to the play as a whole. This is because the play is not written with a bourgeois, “well made” narrative structure, instead it gives the impression of being written automatically, as some of Lorca’s concurrent poetry. Automatic writing is a surrealist technique in which one simply writes without any ideas of form or construction. Instead, you attempt to write directly from your unconscious mind. Obviously, the play is more structured than this, but the impression is unmistakable.
The play is in large part about sexual desire, and homosexuality is a sustained theme. It is one of many taboo topics Lorca includes, and deems to make his play “impossible” to stage due to its content. It is also impossible due to its form: the full text has close to forty separate roles, asks for people to literally disappear on stage, or to magically transform into another person, or for snow to fall from the roof. Its characters stretch from anthropomorphic horses, to Roman Emperors, to Helen of Troy. And it is steeped in Lorca’s obsessions, with women, religion, Andalusia, the moon.
For the last two months, I have attempted, along with a company of eight actors and the production team, to stage a version of this late, great work. We have cut it to work with our company, and have employed extensive multi-roling, maybe an inevitability with a play of this scale. Our main technique has been the development of mask work, something I encountered whilst training in Peru. This theory takes the theatrical mask and gives it a quasi-religious status, a sense of great power and reverence, and an energy pool the actor can draw from to become other. This seems to me to be one of the main themes of Lorca’s text, becoming other — whether this be expressing what you truly are – becoming an anxious or melancholic projection of yourself in times of crisis – or ultimately, transcending life and accepting death.
These are profound themes, and run the risk of sounding too lofty and intellectual. The play might be “difficult” in a literary sense, but to interpret it like you might interpret Ibsen is a grave mistake. The joy of this play is to jump in the deep end of it, to be washed over by its crazy, intense, blue images. Lorca does not write for this to be interpreted, indeed sections of the play defy interpretation, and exist in their total paradox.
This is a play to feel, to experience, truly experience. It refuses to accommodate you, you have to let it delight you, shock you, baffle you, repulse you. But it is not made in a self-indulgent way either. It is constructed in the tradition of the great tragedies, it’s the human cry to the Gods. But this time, the tragedy is not the folly of one hero, rather, the tragedy is the inevitability of the inexpressible. How difficult it is to say what we truly feel! How difficult it is to construct, truly construct, rather than destroy. How difficult it is to love deeply, with your whole heart, despite what the mass says.
So it is with this reflection that I invite you to El Público. Don’t come for a great story. Don’t come to interpret. Rather come, with unprejudiced eyes, to be shown a radically different sort of theatre. One which not only offers us some possibilities for an aesthetics of the future, but draws on ancient rituals, and appeals to our senses in a profound way. Come to feel. Come to dream, and you will be rewarded with dreams within dreams within dreams.
I remember the first time I saw this play, I must have been thirteen years old. I had watched some drama school students perform a version very similar to the one we will be presenting next week. I walked out confused, I didn’t quite get it. But it’s never left my mind since, it has shaped practically everything I’ve ever thought about theatre, and I cannot stop dreaming about it. Its language, its sequences, its images. Ever since, I have craved this kind of theatre. Maybe we have achieved a small step towards it next week. We would be delighted to share it with you.
On the 27th, 28th, 29th March (yes, we open on International Theatre Day!) the Spanish Society of the University of Edinburgh, alongside the department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies will be presenting Lorca’s late surrealist masterpiece El Público at the Bedlam Theatre.
Tickets can be found here: https://bedlamtheatre.co.uk/shows/elpublico-2025?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaYyueC9la_XryQhHE3HiqlQU-OTGoMz3zwfO90ip07enU8Yw0p94j0pVrw_aem_ZfXc1p-Ozv0w6e4s0ubTSQ
Image by @katycf via Bedlam Theatre