Spanish · 1903–1965
Alejandro Casona was a Spanish playwright and teacher whose real name was Alejandro Rodríguez Álvarez. He was born in Asturias and trained as a teacher. In the 1930s he directed the Teatro del Pueblo, a travelling theatre that took classic Spanish plays to villages during the Second Republic. His own early successes included La sirena varada, which won the Lope de Vega prize in 1934. After the Spanish Civil War he went into exile and settled in Buenos Aires, where he lived for about twenty-four years. There he wrote his best-known plays, among them Prohibido suicidarse en primavera, La dama del alba, Los árboles mueren de pie and La barca sin pescador. His theatre mixes realism with fantasy, poetry and gentle humour, and it often turns on the power of illusion to help people face life. He returned to Spain in 1962 and was welcomed by audiences and critics. He died in Madrid in 1965. His plays remain regular choices for Spanish-language stages and school reading lists.