Abstract
Born to a life of abundance and privilege, Federico Garcia Lorca (1838 -1936) showed ample leanings from an early age, towards the performing arts of music and drama. From his mother who was a trained pianist he took his love of the piano and poetry, the gift of theatre too was his companion. Lorca’s father was a successful businessman while Lorca the sensitive, impulsive poet-playwright was at the other extreme of the pragmatic scale. To his dismay he discovered soon that he was also a homosexual – a location where love becomes social taboo and is denied its natural course of expression.
The Butterfly’s Evil Spell which was his first play to go onstage is a masked symbolist expression of the inner crisis and identity issues that plagued the young poet. Located in the humble insect world with a cast of cockroaches, a scorpion and a butterfly – the play has to it a fairytale quality, a non-natural context and a delicate, feeling narrative that weaves in the poet’s (and many a struggling young heart’s) aspirations to join the sun-moon and cosmic mysteries with the stirrings of young love that is impossible and doomed.
The play which has an opera like quality was better justified by Edward Lambert’s 2017 production of it as The Butterfly’s Spell: A Chamber Play. Lambert’s improvisation of it as a fable framed in the modern day context does more justice to Lorca’s beautiful but failed first attempt to bring forth poetic-love, fantasy, in the form of a regular play.
Keywords: Symbolist & Expressionist drama, fluid-theatre, homoerotic, chamber opera.
The ant, half dead,
Says sadly:
“I saw the stars.”
“What are the stars?”
The ants say, anxiously.
And the snail asks,
Pensively, “stars?”
“Yes,” repeats the ant.
“I saw the stars
I went to the tallest tree
In the grove
And saw thousands of eyes
Inside my darkness.”
The snail asks
“But what are stars?”
“they’re lights we carry
On our heads.”
“We can’t see them.”
The ant says.
And the snail:
“My eyes
can’t see beyond the grass.”
[‘The Encounters of an Adventurous Snail,’ Garcia Lorca.]
These are lines from a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca written shortly before he debuted with his first play written on the same lines as the poem. The Play was called The Butterfly’s Evil Spell and it was a flop on the very first day; it simply failed to match up to the audience’s expectations, for they had come to watch a regular fun play.
Eighty years later however, both the poem and the play would become palpable material for improvisations as opera and musical theatre, in the hands of theatre producers and companies. Lorca’s art of drama was an artistic blend of poetry, music, choreographed movement and visual design. The subjective concerns of his drama emerge from emotions of intense isolation and entrapment born of homophobic complications in love – an aspect which for the strapping young Lorca in early 20th century Spain was a very death knell. His homosexual status in fact is believed to have hastened his death by gunshot in August 1936. He was merely 38 years old then and had had a career of 19 years as poet, playwright and theatre director. During his brief career Federico Garcia Lorca is said to have resurrected and revived the basic forms of Spanish poetics and dramatic performance.
Lorca is primarily known for his Andalusian tragedies and for his poetry. For my presentation on drama I have undertaken to read his very first play which was rejected by Spanish audiences in the city of Granada. My reasons for doing so are as follows: to begin with the play being his first, provides us with an insight into Lorca’s virgin craft and uncorrupted vision of drama; secondly, it showcases an interesting blend of his sensibility as poet and pianist – both impulses find expression in his soft representations of an ordinary but surreal insect-world. 3) Thirdly, the subject of the play derives its libido from the poet’s tragic despair over his special (homoerotic) needs which were taboo and regarded as sinful by Spanish laws and society. An overview of Garcia Lorca’s later day plays does bring this fact to the surface. It is a rare Lorcan play that ends on a happy note, Lorca’s drama mostly complicates and interrogates the messy paths of love. His own disappointments and frustrations in love are never openly expressed; rather the theme of ill-fated, impossible love, finds outlet through contexts of family feuds, sagas of revenge, orthodox custom, repressive societal control and the twists of tragic irony. It is an oblique critique the Lorcan plays offer as they trace play after play, the witch hunt of doomed star-crossed lovers. The drama of love-death is all the more spectacular as Lorca brings to the stage, plays that combine with aesthetic finesse skills of the artist, musician, dancer, poet and playwright. Lorca’s initiation to the arts began with his passion for the piano followed by a natural movement towards poetry and eventually drama. The Butterfly’s Evil Spell – the first play of his career carries an imprint of his latent strengths, his personal trauma and existential footprint.
The plot of the play runs like this: On a fine summer day, an injured butterfly falls into the tall grass of an Andalusian farm near a colony of cockroaches, causing a momentary interruption in the lives of the roaches who have never seen a butterfly before. There is speculation over the butterfly’s appearance – is she a fairy, an angel? Is she an auspicious intruder or what….what is the significance? This is a colony of cockroaches but in Lorca’s allegorical and personified rendering they come across as quite humanised. Parent cockroaches even caution their kids about her, but Beetle boy – a young roach who reads poetry (and is corrupted by it), is mesmerised by the butterfly who is fragile and beautiful as poetry itself. He asks her about her world of sunlight, flowers and the blue sky….and even tries to fly with his short wings but falls! As the hours tick by we see beetle boy’s despair rise, for the healing butterfly is likely to fly (away) as day approaches…
Here in this play it is the hierarchy of the natural order that postulates the love-problem – for how can love between superior creatures like the butterfly and the cockroach that lives in the gutters of life thrive? Same would be the case if a lion and a lamb were to fall in love – in the natural order of things the two are pitched too far apart, such a match were probable only in the realm of art and imagination or in Hatha Yoga – where Kabiriyat apparelled in a semiotic that is ‘ulatbamsi’ in a world that is magical and subversive, like a child’s or a madman’s land of sublime fantasy; in such a world impossible longings and love may well flourish, but in a mortal world ruled by mortal order and sanity.
The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, can however, be read as a symbolist and an expressionist play which explores in an imaginary non-natural world, the tragic subtext of Lorca/ Beetle boy’s dark, conflicted reality. Scarred by rejection, existential ennui and the crisis of conflicted selfhood – Federico Garcia Lorca who was handsome and prosperous but homoerotic in orthodox 19th century Spain went on to repeatedly celebrate in his work, the tragic narrative of tragic love. Located in the humble insect world with a cast of cockroaches, a scorpion, two fireflies and a butterfly among others, the play capitalises the delicate impulse of the fairytale narrative as it unfolds in a surreal context. The lovesick Boybeetle’s sense of being damned in a roach-body in fact is the poet’s own sense of entrapment. Thus the play landscapes the romantic aspirations of a young male (man or cockroach); thickening the intensity of helplessness & longing by way of repeated references to Beetle boy’s desire for metamorphoses that is unachievable and beyond reach.
As Alfonzo Vazquez from the Eslava Theatre recounts, the play in fact was originally a poem that Lorca was encouraged to convert into a play; Alfonzo says:
The genesis of the play was humble. Lorca met Gregorio Martínez Sierra, director of the Eslava theatre, at the Centro Artístico y Literario in Granada. Lorca recited a poem for him and Catalina Bárcena — Martínez Sierra’s first wife and first actress in the Eslava company -- a poem about a butterfly with a broken wing that falls into a nest of roaches. The roaches take care of her and cure her wing. When the butterfly flies away, she leaves behind a small cockroach who dies love-struck. Ian Gibson — who was not there, but heard the story — documented Martínez Sierra’s reaction to Lorca’s poem: ‘This poem is pure theatre! Marvelous! You must extend it and turn it into real theatre. I give you my word that it will open at the Eslava.’ When Federico finished reciting the poem, – Gibson explains – Catalina Bárcena’s face was covered in tears and Martínez Sierra could not contain his enthusiasm.
The manuscript of the play as it exists today is incomplete. But according to the Argentinian writer Alfredo de la Gaurdia who was present at the one and only original showing of The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, the play ends like this: Finally the butterfly - perceived in the cockroach world as an enchantress – regains the strength in her wings and flies away into the light of the day. She disappears from sight while beetle boy ponders over the heavenly aspects of the airy world she had described. Completely disoriented he finds himself unable to breathe in the dark earth – as he collapses from heartbreak he holds a bright vision of her in his eyes. Branded by the evil spell of the butterfly lover Beetle boy dies.
The play which offers a meditation on the eruptive and healing potential of a higher/ impossible love, can also be read as a fabulist allegory where human emotions are played out in their raw gullible form across the urchin reality of a cockroach-world where the roaches live – crawling around in the undergrowth in a line of mud caves, besides a cypress tree somewhere in an Andalusian field. Once the physical aspect of human characters as insects that speak and exist in a lesser world has been established, one enters a world of make believe and personification where there is a blurring of conventional distinctions between the serious and the trivial, the sombre and the absurd.
On a literary level Lorca’s leafy roachy world is located in the surreal, the expressionist and the poetic imaginary; at the level of performance the play (with its creatures dressed in creative costumes, emitting human and subhuman sounds and movements) offers immense creative potential to blending alternate forms of art, dance and costume design into performance as carnival, opera, musical drama or spectacle. While a paper-reading of The Butterfly can easily pass off as children’s literature or as the stuff of fables, when acted out on stage, the play however tends towards the comic grotesque and the Bakhtinian ‘carnivalesque’.
To the regular theatre loving audience of Granada who were totally unprepared for Lorca’s experiment with fluid-theatre, the experiment with its outlandish caste line of cockroaches, a scorpion, fireflies and a butterfly must have appeared bizarre, outlandish and foolish. Their total transport into a world of dumb insects with little or no intelligence; the absurdity of discourse among cockroaches on love, lust and medicine; the contraptions of Scorpy the drunkard - all this might have come across as the febrile ludicrous workings of a juvenile mind. Lorca might have had better success had he produced the play in a fluid format accompanied with song, dance, elaborate costumes and music in fluid forms of a ballet, an opera or a musical drama or even a puppet drama.
This fact is further confirmed by several modern postmodern improvisations of the play that have been successfully produced by many a theatre and opera director across Europe. One example is of the play as a Chamber Opera by the Music Troupe.co.uk - CrunchyBiteSized Operas; a company of 7 singers and a band of 7 instruments. The improvisation is titled, The Butterfly’s Spell and its promotional literature goes like this: “The Butterfly’s Spell is a chamber opera based on an early play by Federico Garcia Lorca. An expressionist or symbolist drama arising from the writer’s identity issues, it depicts the world of insects – giving fine opportunities for exotic costumes and surreal staging. It tell how a Poet Beetle rejects the love of the devoted Sylvia in favour of an impossible infatuation for a fragile Butterfly whose destiny is to fly away, leaving the Poet to die of a broken heart. A sad tale, but a comic opera which also features a drunken Scorpion, an overbearing Mother and two fireflies which glow in the dark. Suitable for all ages.” The poem Lorca wrote before he penned his first play, ‘The Encounters of an Adventurous Snail’ – even that poem was produced recently between August 29 to September 8, 2019 as a shadow-puppetry musical by The Unnatural Disaster Theatre Company at the Bus Stop Theatre, in Gottingen St. Halifax, Canada.
Lorca’s early experiments in playwriting showcased more prominently his own wealth of artistic talent as pianist, painter, dramatist and poet. By the time he wrote his later works like Blood Wedding and Yerma, he had evolved a style that was deeply lyrical and resonant with the aesthetic of Andalusian folk traditions and virile agrarian language. Lorca’s plays were infamous for their homoerotic character and language and were banned for the first half of the 20th century. The Modernismo School, Symbolist and Expressionist drama are categories in which his work is cast often. I quote:
“As a leftist and modernist, he was ahead of his time in embracing cultural diversity and plural identities. For him, the universality of flamenco lay in its peculiarity, in its unique expressive forms, in the access they gave to remote but shared human realms. He championed the music of the gypsies as he did the Muslim and Jewish roots of Spanish culture. All of which made him a prime target for the fascists, who murdered him in the early days of the civil war.” (Marqusse, ‘Flemenco’s Humane Roots’)
Thus as I conclude I’d like to offer a few observations: (1) We can say that the earliest plays of Federico Garcia Lorca were lyrical plays bearing non-human, fabulous and fairytale contexts which being profound and allegorical lent themselves better to alternate forms of drama like puppetry-theatre, opera, spectacle etc – they even resonate with forms of natya (dramatic performance) that we have in India like tamasha, raas-bhavai and ram-leela, where music, song, dance and drama with elaborate costumes come together in a space of the aesthetic, carnival joyance – an energy Mikhail Bakhtin terms as the ‘carnivalesque’. (2) His plays express an almost violent emotional intensity which demands attention and is aesthetically moulded to fuse both the raw and the refined. Lorca fashions his world of drama with a profusion of symbolist technique, a richly woven semiotic fused with language that is poetic and imaginative, he uses sharp contrast and colours to feed and fashion dramatic movement through plot subversions, ironic reversals and tragic twists.
For instance, Blood Wedding which is one of his later plays dazzles with sizzling symbolism, misogyny and an emotionally charged poetic. The language is homoerotic - bold allusions to land as fertile and sexually productive, sexually suggestive allusions to certain animals, images, personification of the elements and a daredevil narrative - Lorca explores creative possibilities to which language can be bent. His rendering is rasa-pradhanya and closer to the Indian concept of Natya as performance that is complete and comprised of all the arts. Another interesting feature of this play is that most characters are known by their nominal names as Mother, Son-in-Law etc. – this perhaps is agaiin a strategy to free the plot of local moorings and locate it in an archetypal realm ? Or perhaps the intention is to draw us exclusively into the emotion and drama of the moment by undermining the individuality of the characters to ensure our undivided attention?
It would be fitting to state that we find in Lorca’s writings a fusion of the folk and the surrealist techniques. As poet-artist Lorca’s attempts to bridge the real and the imagined worlds take him to the ends of the macrocosmic landscape which he personifies and melds with intensity into the sweat and soil of lived human experience. This is where the folk comes in with narratives soaked in the blood of lost loves and families feuds. Lorca skilfully fashions the carnal and the sublime, the surreal and the oral folk into his work creating drama that is dark and brilliant and deeply disturbing.
Let me also note that The Butterfly’s Evil Spell in fact showcases the lifetime themes and strengths of Garcia Lorca’s theatre. As his craft evolved and flourished he brought us through his work a richer platter of imagery – more virile, more indigenous and folk – he spoke in a language that was homoerotic, highly symbolic, potently charged and poetic. His vision of theatre comprised choreographed stage movements and striking visual aesthetics to create a complete experience of drama as fluid and an all-embracing platform. An approach that is very close to the Indian understanding of drama as complete performance, where all the arts meet in active interactive participation.
REFRENCES: