Francisco Nieva, 'Coronada y el toro'

Coronada y el toro (Coronada and the Bull) is a play written in 1974 by Francisco Morales Nieva (1924-2016), a prominent figure in the history of Spanish theatre. Even though the aesthetic quality of his drama competed with that of his contemporaries, many with whom he interacted (Ionesco, Genet, Brecht, Grotowski, etc.), Nieva's recognition was unduly delayed within Spain and, on the international scene, his name remains eclipsed by playwrights such as Federico García Lorca and Antonio Buero Vallejo. Traditionalist and populist yet cosmopolitan and neo-avant-garde, Nieva began writing plays in the late 1940s but never got the chance to perform any on the commercial stage until 1976, a few months after the death of General Francisco Franco, whose censorship machine forced his work underground. Hard to subject to any single classification, Nieva's theatre is as complex as it is innovative in its combination of resources from a wide range of artistic trends, from the género chico to the Baroque to postmodernism. Coronada y el toro is a sophisticated masterpiece, rich in intertextuality, humour, and suspense.