"Panic Theatre": Arrabal's Mythic Baroque

Abstract

Fernando Arrabal pointedly restated and justified his predilection for baroque writing in 1969, meanwhile denouncing the undue bareness of "objectal" literature: "Profusion and austerity combine, are married admirably in the baroque, that is why I prefer it to so-called 'objectal' literature, which . . appears to me a dangerous temptation toward outmoded impoverishment in objectivity."l An irreducible core of Arrabal's plays and a root of their "austerity" is the theme of reality's totalitarian repressiveness versus theatricalized dreams of Youth in Eden. This deeply imbedded tension can be traced to the author's precocious terrors and sense of alienation formed in Franco's Spain. Born in Melilla, in former Spanish Morocco, in 1932, Arrabal moved to the mainland of Spain as a young boy. With one of his first plays (composed in Spanish) Arrabal won a scholarship enabling him to go to Paris in 1955. Since then, he has refused to go back to Spain, except for one injudicious trip in 1967, which led to two months in a Spanish prison. Written or adapted in French since 1955. Arrabal's plays have been performed widely in Germany, England, Poland, Italy, Scandinavia, South America, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere. They have been translated into more than twenty languages.2 Integrated profusion, says Arrabal, is his instinctive theatrical mode of combining phantasmagoric perceptions in new forms of drama comparable to an opera mundi: