Reviews

"Eliminate humor from Muñoz Seca’s plays; remove the caricatures, strip him of his satirical genius and ability to create parody, and you will still be standing before a monumental playwright.”

Ramón Mª. del Valle Inclán (1869-1936).
Playwright, poet, novelist.

"To dare to write comedy is not to commit an outrage, it is not daring to be respectable, it is not vying for high esteem. And no one has the right to condemn, and least of all to be inconsiderate towards those who cultivate it, nor to demand they explain ambitions they do not harbor.”

Manuel Machado (1874-1947).
Poet and writer.

"A unique case: I do not think there is any other author in any other language like him in Spain, and no one has been as combative and injured by the learned critics and public. I think critics are wasting their time with him. He is not responsible for his success; it is the society so admirably represented in his plays.”

Luis Araquistáin (1886-1959).
Politician, writer and journalist.

"Can someone who has legitimately laughed so hard be angry? Can and should he be angry with himself and those who have made him laugh so hard at petty jokes that stir only the shallowest parts of the spirit?”

Enrique Díez Canedo (1879-1944).
Theater critic.

"Plays that lack historic importance, but are immensely important from a sociological standpoint as a first-hand account (…) Skillful and funny plays based on current themes and issues.”

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (1910-1999).
University professor of Language and Literature. Novelist and Cervantes laureate in 1985.

"Muñoz Seca, blindly, mixing everything, without refinement, despite his unrevolutionary personality, temperament and spirit, gives the first kick to the old ways of Spanish comedy and sets the precedent for no other than the theatre of the absurd. The theatre of the unlikely. The theatre of the ridiculous. The farce.”

Francisco García Pavón (1919-1989).
Critic and writer. Nadal laureate 1969.

"Muñoz Seca understood his critics and knew they were right in certain points. But he preferred to cater to his public, the public that admired and paid him. Like any good observer, he knew how to further deform the deformed, how, with a more caustic intention, Valle-Inclán was doing, the other, more bitter side of the same satirical coin.”

José Luis Tejada (1927-1988).
Poet and essayist from El Puerto.

"True culture is adding, not removing. We can like Muñoz Seca as well as Unamuno, Valle-Inclán and García Lorca. If we really like theatre, we should include all of our theatre traditions, without prejudice or exclusions.”

Andrés Amorós (1941).
Professor of Spanish Literature of the Complutense University of Madrid. Literary critic.

"Comedy theatre seems easy, when the author wants to make it look that way. Muñoz Seca hides, in the apparent simplicity of his works, a clever game of dialogues, situations, characters… I still find many of his works funny at the end of our twentieth century…”

José Luis Alonso de Santos (1942).
Playwright. National Theatre Award laureate 1985.