The playwright Alfonso Sastre has passed away this Friday, September 17 at 95 years old, as announced by the municipal group Abosanitz, which recalls that “literature was his working tool and his weapon of revolution ”.
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Tailor has been a key playwright of the 20th century and a writer with a wide spectrum of literary genres. From a very young age, he decided to direct his life along the lines of the theater and the need to give his work a critical dimension, social and revolutionary agitation, arose.
In 1946 he founded, together with other colleagues, the avant-garde theater group Arte Nuevo. In those years it also began his work as a playwright, with titles such as ‘Sleepwalking Comedy’, ‘Uranio 235’ or ‘Cargo of Dreams’, among others. In 1950, together with José María de Quinto, he signed a manifesto announcing the founding of the Teatro de Agitación Social. In 1953, the year in which he finished his studies in Philosophy, he premiered ‘Squad towards death’, a work censored after its third performance in Madrid. (Teatro María Guerrero) by a university theater group.
After a first avant-garde stage, Sastre’s dramatic work is oriented towards the theme of the revolutionary transformation of the world and ‘Squad towards death’ is followed by important works, of which he is only allowed to stage a few; in some the theme is the revolution (‘The garbage can’, ‘Everyone’s bread’, ‘Guillermo Tell has sad eyes’, among others) and elements such as freedom, guilt or responsibility appear in all, with an action located in Spain (‘Muerte en el barrio’ or ‘La cornada’), or in another country with a clear Spanish significance (as in the cases of ‘The gag’ or ‘Night assault’). In 1961 he created the Grupo de Teatro Realista, a model of the emergency theater that he advocated. His dramatic work is very extensive and he also writes other works such as ‘Ana Kleiber’, ‘The Blood of God’ and ‘The Raven’.
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Over the last few years, ‘La gitana Celestina’ (1985), ‘La taberna fantástica’ (1985), ‘Historia de una doll abandoned’ (1989), ‘The last days of Emmanuel Kant’ (1990), ‘The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant’ (1990), ‘Men and their shadows’ (1991), ‘The infinite journey of Sancho Panza’ (1992), ‘Where are you, Ulalume, where are you?’ (1994) or ‘The gods and the horns’ (1995).
His latest published narrative works include: ‘Necrópolis’ (1994) and ‘Historias de California’ (in Galician language, 1995); among his latest books of poetry, ‘Life of the invisible man told by himself’ (1995) and ‘The Gospel of Dracula’ (1997).
All of his works are in the process of being published in Hiru Argitaletxea, and in the book ‘Alfonso Sastre o la illusión tragica’ (Hiru, 1997), published in commemoration of the fifty years since the appearance of the Arte Nuevo group, they have been summarized his life and his work. He has also received numerous awards, including two National Awards, one in 1985 for ‘La taberna fantástica’ and another in 1993 for ‘Jenofa Juncal’.
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