For decades, Alfonso Sastre was the portrait in the attic showing the sordid and aged face of the cheerful Spanish culture.
Sastre, lived three decades of forgetfulness, no premieres for the texts of him, no recognition for him.
The hardness of his works, his political discourse (in summary: he aligned with Herri Batasuna, lived in community with his paintings and was his electoral candidate in the toughest years of ETA) and his tenebrist vision of modern Spain became a
Cursed character.
It was an artistic death in life for the author of squad to death (1953), from which he only returned partly and in concrete moments of the 1980s and twentieth century.
Sastre died yesterday at 95 in Fuenterrabía, the town of Guipúzcoa in which he settled many years ago.
At the dramatist it is easy to locate it on a map of the Spanish culture of the twentieth century.
Contemporary of social novelists, of the poets of the generation of the middle century and the first filmmakers of the Official Film School, Sastre was in the first cultural response against the Francoism in the 50s. His first bell was squad to death
, a milestone of the Spanish theater of the twentieth century, translated and represented in several countries, which was censored by the State after three representations at the María Guerrero Theater.
Squad towards death was also a perfectly universal and avant-garde text for its time: the fear of nuclear war, the absurd, the answer against authority, existential pain … all that was in a war piece that told history
From a detachment of vanguard that, in the midst of the Third World War, he eliminated his officer and began a morally anguished survival struggle.
Square towards the death came to the scenarios ephemented and in continuity with the most disruptive premieres of Antonio Buero Vallejo (in the ardent darkness and history of a staircase).
Together they pose a stubbornness of nonconformity after the years of blackout of the first postwar period.
By that time, Sastre’s militancy was not so obvious.
The sociological origin of him was that of those who had lost war: He had been actor and the family of the mother came from rural emigration;
The bombing of Madrid caught them in the capital.
However, Sastre had come to college and had entered the circles of the cultured bourgeoisie of the time.
The same circles in which, by those years of the premiere of squad towards death, Jorge Semprún preached the return of the PCE to Spain.
Tailor and the couple of him, Eva Forest, were co-employed by the writer, although all scalded came out of that association.
Semprún became one of the greatest enemies of the PCE and referred with irony to Sastre and Forest, to which he reproached a stetized radicality, narcissistic and full of contradictions.
And these, shortly after, they also abandoned the PCE for the bad.
Carrillo’s party seemed like little.
Many years later, Sastre was still defining as a communist, as the only communist in Europe that thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a necessary purification on the road to the revolution.
In parallel there was theater: the cycle of the revolutionary theater of the 50 and that of the “Theater penultimate” of the 60s (the fantastic tavern was the great milestone of that time).
The first, the most artistic and experimental the first one.
Sastre evolved as if it were a character of Godard China, on a radical path that mixed idealism and personal restlessness.
In that search for stronger sensations, Sastre and Forest left the PCE in 1970 and found a refuge and a door to the Basque nationalism.
Forest collaborated in attacks like the street mail, which left 12 dead.
He spent three years in jail for that.
Sastre, eight months.
When Democracy arrived, Bordeaux left, but France ended up expelling them.
By 1979, the couple was already established in Guipúzcoa and integrated between the pictures of Herri Batasuna.
“I do not want pacification for Euskadi, Pacification was the Roman pax that imposed by police oppression, and I do not want it.”
Sastre did not stop writing theater at that time, although he did not premiere his works, neither in Madrid nor in the Basque Country.
The funny thing is that many of these unpublished texts seem to dialogue with the tradition of the Spanish Baroque Theater, they seem subversions of Sainers and classical characters that Tailor coated with the detailed images of the twentieth century.
Also José Bergamín, the other Spanish writer Abertzale of the time, lived in that strange dialogue.
There were reconciliation amagos: in 1986, the National Theater Award chose Tailor.
In 2006, in the middle of Zapatero, the scenarios of Madrid returned some of the works of him.
And, in this same decade, ELLAGO of Sastre entered a period of standardization: a new generation discovered a squad towards death and read it from the keys to a new era.
