The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Spain through Theatre Performances in Spanish Translation

This lecture will focus on the reception of Wilde’s dramatic production in Spain at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – the two periods in which the stage reception of his creative work was at its richest. Wilde’s plays were first introduced through the translations and theatre productions by Ricardo Baeza, an influential figure in the literary and theatrical circles of the time. The reviews of those early performances, together with Baeza’s translations, provide insight into the factors that triggered the performance history of Wilde in Spain and determined his continuous presence in the country’s theatre repertories. The centenary of Wilde’s death in 2000 sparked a renewed interest in the writer’s work in general, which could also be seen in the country’s theatres; so, in the second part of the lecture, we will turn our attention to productions in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. The analysis of those earliest and latest Spanish performances will hopefully throw light on the reception of Wilde in translation and on his contribution to the theatre world in Spain.