Un soñador para un pueblo (1958) and Las Meninas (1960) constitute something of a digression in the career of Antonio Buero Vallejo. They are preceded by ten years of largely realistic playwriting and followed by what appears to be a renewal of that realistic current. The central characters in these plays are not middle class figures, but intellectuals and artists cast in a heroic mold. Buero is more interested in having them make statements of artistic and political truths than in engaging them in psychological involvements. The settings, of course, do not reflect a contemporary, middle class environment. Both character and scene are historical in nature, but this does not diminish the contemporary relevance of the problems treated by the playwright. Indeed, his main reason for selecting such an era is to criticize the present through the perspective of the past. (p. 281)

By developing the action of these plays according to the requirements of artistic philosophies and forms, the playwright is, I suggest, attempting to approximate, in the plays' structures, the spirit of the historical moment depicted in each play. The systematic juxtaposition of characters and attitudes in Un soñador para un pueblo facilitates the contrasting of political ideologies and, therefore, is an evocation of the atmosphere of eighteenth-century Spain, an epoch characterized by ideological struggles. The impressionistic manner of Las Meninas, with its movement and shifting focus, is meant to reflect the suspicion, disloyalty, vested interests and fear of Inquisitional Spain of the seventeenth century. (p. 283)

[Un soñador para un pueblo] is not an indictment of the society's class structure. It shows, rather, in its structural arrangement, the good and evil elements present in every social class. Buero's presentation of Esquilache in each interior scene of Part I does seem, however, to encourage a fluid social structure, one which would allow change and progression for the individual. (p. 285)

Buero's evocation of an eighteenth-century atmosphere is markedly enhanced by the clear, orderly arrangement of the action of the play's first part…. [In this way he] has attempted to reflect the spirit of classicism, the dominant artistic mode of the epoch…. (p. 286)

Character development in Part I [of Las Menias] is not structured in an orderly, sequential pattern; here Buero emphasizes the spatial rather than the linear. Action shifts to various areas of the stage within the same scene. This section is an impressionistic "painting"—a dramatic Las Meninas—which offers an overwhelming impression of intrigue and subversion in everyday court life. Buero converts Velázquez's pictorial technique into a dramatic medium through the use of multiple scene changes, simultaneous actions and different degrees of illumination. (pp. 286-87)

Las Meninas is more than a play about painting or artistic theory; it is a painting. The impressionistic technique which Velázquez expounds is the dramatic technique Buero employs in the first part of this drama…. Many things are suggested but none explained or justified. Attention moves quickly from one character to another, from one place on stage to another, from one action to another. The result is an enigmatic kaleidoscope of purposeful confusion and suspicion. Secondly, the characters are developed according to the way they see each other and in their very efforts to see or to conceal…. (p. 289)

In Part II Buero interprets, through trial procedure with its systematic appearances of witnesses, the impressionistic details of the first part. The characters' secret motives are brought into the open, into sharp focus. This is symbolized by the suspension of action in the play's final scene. There the characters take the places of their namesakes in the painting Las Meninas. (p. 290)

In his painting Velázquez tries to give a true picture of court life by the action of freezing people at work rather than having them assume poses…. Buero, in his Las Meninas, has brought to life the frozen expressions and postures of Velázquez's masterpiece. With regard to technique, the play is pictorial just as the painting is dramatic.

The interaction between drama (life) and painting is also reflected in the thematic development of the play. If the portrayal of servants and artist at work is the true representation of court life, then the reflection of the posed figures of the king and queen in the mirror at the back of the painting symbolizes the falseness of that life. (pp. 290-91)

Buero seems to be saying that only he who appreciates artistic beauty can comprehend how intolerable is the suffering of the world. Conversely, only he who is cognizant of human suffering can comprehend the beautiful in art. (p. 291)

These two history plays together represent, I think, the greatest technical achievement of Antonio Buero Vallejo. The innovation distinguishing them from his realistic dramas is not so much their historical settings as it is the fact that they fuse other art forms with the dramatic. This fusion causes the magnifying of the role of one or more of the traditional dimensions of a dramatic presentation, the visual, the auditory and action itself. The presentation thereby acquires an affective intensity calculated to engulf the spectator with an overwhelming emotional impression. (p. 292)

[Buero] wants to trigger an emotional reaction in the audience in spite of the historical distance of these plays. The supreme function of tragedy, according to Buero, is revelation and its resultant provocation to action. And this provocation to action—the desire to help one's fellow man—must come through catharsis…. (p. 293)