SOURCE: “Framing on Stage and Screen: Antonio Buero Vallejo's Un soñador para un pueblo and Josefina Molina's Esquilache,” in Romance Studies, No. 26, Autumn, 1995, pp. 61–76.

In the following essay, Thompson compares the stage production of Buero Vallejo's Un soñador para un pueblo to its film adaptation Esquilache.

Film has always been an intertextually promiscuous medium, frequently producing offspring from liaisons (some committed and deeply-felt, some casual, some provoking accusations of rape) with narrative and theatre. After a hundred years of development, the distinctive features of cinema are well established, but the genes of the older media are still influential. Films continue to be concerned with story-telling, or playing games with narrative voices and structures, or presenting detailed portraits of complex fictional worlds; and they continue to dramatize human relationships by showing the acting-out of dialogues and conflicts, or to examine social rituals and role-playing. Each cinematic adaptation...