Virgilio Piñera in His Sea of Props

Abstract

The publication of Virgilio Piñera’s Teatro completo –selection, organisation and prologue by Rine Leal– offers a unique opportunity for the long awaited restoration of the Cuban’s work as a totality in its analysis of the absurd as well as the realist; the unpublished, marginalised and unfinished Piñera alongside the constant experimentor. At the same time, it means the appearance of the posthumous Virgilio who, transgressive and daring, talks of the crisis in Cuban society and has been revived in dozens of stagings since Carlos Díaz’s version of La niñita querida. As he himself predicted, there is no need for false moustaches, for walking naked onto the stage wrapped in a sheet or putting a washbasin on the head. The euphoria which his plays have provoked in the nineties has meant his definitive theatrical emergence.