Another Spanish playwright and poet, Alberto Conejero, has added two acts to murdered author’s work, now known as The Dream of Life

Eighty years after Federico García Lorca was murdered in the early days of the Spanish civil war, an unfinished play by the poet and dramatist has finally been completed and given a title.



Lorca had written only the first section of the three-act work, known until now as Comedia sin título, or Play Without a Title, when he was killed by a fascist death squad near Granada in August 1936.



Eight decades on, another Spanish playwright and poet, Alberto Conejero, has taken up where Lorca left off, adding two acts to the play now known as El sueño de la vida, or The Dream of Life.



Set in a theatre where A Midsummer Night’s Dream is being performed, the play sees a revolution spill off the streets outside and into the auditorium itself. The action then switches to a morgue in the pit of the theatre and finally to the gods in heaven.



Both its title and its themes echo two of the best-known plays of Calderón, the master dramatist of Spain’s golden age: Life is a Dream and one of his religious works, The Great Theatre of the World.



Conejero says that the play, which could be considered the final part of Lorca’s surrealist cycle, which includes The Public and When Five Years Pass, has lost none of its political urgency despite the creative hiatus.



“It’s a play about the role of theatre when confronted with a social emergency but it’s also about the necessity of fiction and poetry in a world in ruins,” Conejero told the Guardian.



He said that although he had been obsessed with the play for years, the current political situation had spurred him into action: “[It] fulfils the role of theatre in times of social crisis and amid the rise of fanaticism, and I feel it’s absolutely necessary now.”



Conejero is reluctant to describe his work on the play as an act of completion, arguing that it’s more than just a feat of imaginative guesswork.



“I don’t think that ‘finishing’ is the best word. It’s more about a dialogue with Federico’s voice and carrying on with that impulse. I’ve created a new piece but at its heart is Lorca’s Play Without a Title. I haven’t touched a comma of his act.”



But while Conejero has stuck closely and respectfully to Lorca’s original plans for the play by studying accounts from those who knew him, news of the undertaking has reignited a familiar debate over the fate of unfinished works.



“I’ve tried to keep the writing away from the public eye but there has been a bit of controversy following the announcement,” he said. “The worst thing is considering Lorca as somehow untouchable. His work is more alive than ever and it’s crying out for bodies, voices and new horizons.”



Conejero views the project, commissioned by the culture department of Madrid’s regional government, as a gift and a chance to “tap an exceptional poetic well”.

“My playwriting has been an exercise of love, of recognising my debt as an author and my smallness in comparison with the original.”



And anyway, he adds: “Anyone who wants to discover Play Without a Title as it was left can always do so. I haven’t painted over the canvas.”

The text will be published next year and the first performance will follow in 2018.

In the meantime, Conejero is quietly confident that his long-dead collaborator would approve of his efforts.

“Federico was a figure of light, someone who rushed through each second of his life precisely because he had a tremendous sense of death,” he said. “I think he’d be happy to know he’s still needed and still loved.”

