Lorca

My friend in Granada, one of the major Lorca scholars, was saying; with Lorca, people never seem to realize when the standard has been set. There is a really great production of a play, and then people want to do a worse one....  [paraphrasing].  It's a mystery.

There was a production of "Diálogo del amargo." The text is a short one, so they did it three times, with a different emphasis each time, and with a lot of added material. I was making the point that they wouldn't fuck around with Samuel Beckett in this way. Beckett demanded that his texts be respected. Lorca didn't live long enough for that. The family did what it could, and got criticized, but now everything is fair game. Ian Gibson was there and liked the play, saying that you had to make every Lorca play about historical memory.

But no. The idea of re-purposing all his works to make them about HIS DEATH is the very definition of the Lorca myth.  Paul J. Smith said this years ago.  

You might say that as an expert in creative re-adaptation I shouldn't mind so much... but I do.

This was the last meeting I had in my ill-fated sabbatical in Spain. After that, the country shut down. I went back to Madrid and then flew back to Lawrence.