Twentieth-Century Spanish Stage Design

This article provides a short history of twentieth-century Spanish stage design. Starting with an introduction to the way in which painted backdrops developed from the nineteenth century, mention is made of important designers such as Amalio Fernández and Salvador Alarma. By the 1920s, the director Gregorio Martínez Sierra had promoted new approaches to design. Dramatists like Lorca, Valle-Inclán and Jardiel Poncela evolved a new aesthetic in written stage directions.

With General Franco's victory in 1939, an ambiguous censorship affected stage design, and even talented designers such as Víctor María Cortezo and Siegfried Burmann came under the influence of the dictatorship. At a subsidized level, technical advances did take place, although the possibilities within commercial theatre remained very reduced. In the 1960s, the Independent Theatre began to encourage an adventurous view of design (taken up by Iago Pericot, for example). Finally, an analysis of the work of Francisco Nieva and Fabià Puigserver shows how other innovative conceptions of design emerged after the end of the Francoist regime.