The Theatre: A Place of Memory

This article looks at the question of transnational memory in the work of contemporary Spanish playwrights, Juan Mayorga and Antonio à lamo. It analyses and interprets the theatrical devices employed by each playwright respectively and the construction of a poetics of memory. It then goes on to consider the multidirectional potential of the intertextual references to other authors, histories and events – most notably the Holocaust – in plays of Mayorga and à lamo. It is via these intertextual engagements that the plays confront the limits, or (im)possibility of representation and it argues that the authors dive into a vast network of European memory, which in turn serves as a ‘screen’ for the memory of Spanish people, as it throws light on the Civil War and Francoist Spain. Thus, experiences such as Stalinism, the Holocaust, and the Warsaw ghetto become icons of a transnational memory that places the reader/spectator in the position of co-participant in an introspective exploration designed to unsettle.