Miguel Servet in Alfonso Sastre's 'Complex' Tragedy: Valle Inclán's esperpento and Brecht's alienation

Abstract

This essay examines the process of creating "complex tragedy", a dramatic form that Alfonso Sastre proposes as the ideal for social and realistic theater and that arises from the evolution of his aesthetics based on two fundamental influences: the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht and the poetics of the esperpento by Ramón María del Valle-Inclán. In the first place, the bases of Sastre's theoretical thought and his conception of tragedy exposed in his first work of dramatic theory, Drama y sociedad (1956), and his proposal to overcome Brechtian theater in Anatomía del realismo (1965) are shown. Secondly, I analyze the first complex tragedy, M.S.V. o La sangre y la ceniza [1965], a work whose dramatic material is the life of the revolutionary Spanish scientist Miguel Servet. The analysis focuses on two elements that distinguish Sastrean tragedy: the construction of the tragic-complex hero devised from a demystification of the traditional hero, and the "boomerang" effect, a technique through which the author wants to achieve a constant tension between the identification and distancing in the viewer. The evolution of Sastre's poetics is determined by the experimental nature of the dramatic form that allows the spectrum of possibilities and different theatrical languages to expand and makes possible the search for a type of tragedy potentially capable of transforming modern society.