La campaña teatral de Ricardo Baeza e Irene López Heredia (1927-1928): historia externa e interna de una colaboración

Abstract

In Spain during the first decades of this century, the commercial theatre flourished in Madrid and the provincial capitals. At the same time, a few pioneers occasionally launched a project aimed at achieving truly «artistic» theatre. But there existed an intermediate path between these two extremes. When the critic and translator Ricardo Baeza entered into formal collaboration -as artistic director- with the actress Irene López Heredia in december 1927, both of them were clearly thinking in terms of this third path: their plan of campaign was to offer «first of all, pleasant plays, for a wide audience and, at the same time, of literary merit», and then, only after having established themselves, «to start offering things that were a little more difficult». Using the press of the period, we can track this artistic collaboration, from the advance publicity prior to the debut of the new company in Zaragoza (20 December 1927), following its itinerary through the provinces and then on to Barcelona to open the new season which commenced on Easter Saturday (7 April 1928). Furthermore, it has been possible to reconstruct the company's repertoire and to calculate the number of performances of each work. Unfortunately, the collaboration did not prosper: the personal conflicts between Baeza and López Heredia, as well as their divergent artistic criteria, caused its dissolution during the company's run in Barcelona.