A Lorca Evening (1951)

This chapter highlights Spanish modernist poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was murdered by fascist paramilitary in 1936. Lorca's theatre is close to the classic theatre of Greece in form as well as in theme. The daughters, the maid of Bernarda Alba in Lorca's final play, The House of Bernarda Alba, do more than serve the purpose of the Greek chorus. They are the chorus and leader. The passion and clarity of that theatre is in Lorca's scenes, a combination of purity and violence which emerges, not as brutality but as form. A control and sense of law in which denial and repression are the worst violence, and can lead only to doom.