Introduction

The breadth of Carmen Martín Gaite's literary output is impressive, and although her dramatic and poetic works are not always of a standard with her fiction, they merit study within the context of her long writing career because they articulate themes extensively explored elsewhere. Furthermore, Carmen Martín Gaite's first creative excursions were in verse, although it took twenty years and the efforts of a publisher to bring these works to light. Her interest in drama is equally significant for an overview of her work, as so many of her novels draw on a theatrical leitmotif to explore questions of identity and communication with others. We therefore devote this chapter to Martín Gaite's dramatic and poetic works, beginning with the former, as they began to be published first, and concluding with the latter, as some of their themes also point towards Martín Gaite's writings for children, the subject of our last chapter.

Martín Gaite's theatre

Martín Gaite's interest in theatre is evident from the many references to the theatre and masks in her novelistic works. She admitted that ‘yo a muchos de mis personajes los veo explícitamente como personajes de teatro’ (I see many of my characters explicitly as theatrical characters). As a student, she was involved in student theatre and at one stage considered becoming an actress. She adapted the theatrical works of various other authors for staging in Spain. As noted in Chapter 11, she completed a version of Gil Vicente’s Don Duardos in 1972, adding some new scenes. She adapted Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla for the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico in 1988 and it was staged at the Almagro Festival that year, directed by Adolfo Marsillach. In 1990, her version of El marinero by Fernando Pessoa was staged in the Teatro Cervantes in Alcalá de Henares, according to Hormigón.

.