Tragedy without a title

Director Roberto Ciulli has concerned himself with the work of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca since beginning work in the theatre (his first production was of Lorca's Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Doña Rosita). Ciulli's persistent interest in Lorca focussed from an early date on the striking unity of the writer's life and work. A central motif running throughout Lorca's life and writings is that of rebellion against rigid rules of society, which collide with the needs of the individual in an inhuman manner. Dream and reality are intertwined contrasts which characterize his work. Lorca was to return to these contradictions again and again, both personally and as an artist.

The son of a prosperous estate owner, he soon entered the circles surrounding innovative and probing young artists such as Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and Rafael Alberti. Politically, he turned his back on his upper-class parentage, becoming ever more interested in the Gypsy way of life, Moorish culture and traditional Spanish folk music. Their influence together with that of surrealism increasingly came to shape his plays. "He was", says Roberto Ciulli, "a practitioner of theatre who put a great deal of political effort into giving the people theatre which was not intellectually hermetic but a new form, popular theatre in the literal sense of the term." In 1922 he founded a festival of cante jondo together with Manuel de Falla, a melancholy form of gypsy music whose songs he collected and occasionally performed as piano accompanist. Fascist Spain regarded the artist, homosexual and political activist Federico García Lorca as an affront. In 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested by Falange militia and shot without trial.