SOURCE: “Dictatorship to Democracy in the Recent Theater of Buero Vallejo (La Fundación to Diáalogo secreto),” in Estreno, Vol. XIII, No. 2, Fall, 1987, pp. 9–15.

In the following essay, Halsey analyzes how Buero Vallejo portrays Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy in his plays written in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ricardo Doménech has demonstrated that Buero's entire theater up to 1971 constitutes a meditation on Spain.¹ In spite of censorship and other restraints imposed by a triumphant and exclusionist Francoist culture that dominated the national scene for some forty years, Buero succeeded in exposing the dark recesses, the hidden reality of Spanish life. Therefore it is hardly surprising that Buero's dramas of the late 1970s and early 1980s deal with the problems of the nation's difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy. As a leftist writer who considers the theater not only a means of reflecting society but of...