[In the following essay, Halsey lauds Barry Jordan's analysis of Buero Vallejo's La doble historia del Doctor Valmy.]

Jordan's edition [of Buero Vallejo's La doble historia del Doctor Valmy] forms part of Manchester's Hispanic Texts series, which aims to select works that “contribute to a fuller understanding of the societies in which they were written.” The text continues the tradition of text-book editions of contemporary plays largely lost in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s, when companies such as Appleton-Century-Crofts and Scribners published editions of plays by Casona, Buero and Sastre that quickly became classics for intermediate reading and undergraduate literature courses. What better way to introduce the student to Spain's people and history than through the theater of such writers?

In his fifty-page introduction, Jordan begins with the play's themes: torture and the complicity of those who choose to ignore its practice. In two sections—“The author: painter, political prisoner, playwright, polemicist” and “Buero's theatre: a brief overview”—Jordan underscores Buero's role as the voice of Spain's conscience during the dictatorship. Conflict and tension, he notes, occur at “individual as well as societal levels” (100). Such is certainly the case, for individual conflict is usually related to the problem of social responsibility. More often than not, especially in recent plays, we see the characters' failure to assume this responsibility, with its tragic consequences. Closely connected to the emphasis on the individual is Buero's stress on the inner dimension of his characters. The dialectic tension between individual and society is paralleled by that between subjective being and objective reality. Jordan discusses Buero's well-known techniques of “immersion” that lead the audience to identify with a specific character, or to achieve a “psychological internalization” (15) of the characters' viewpoint. He also notes Buero's use of narrators and of action structured like narration, noting, however, that the narrators' function is not so much to distance the spectators as to involve them.

The third and much more extensive part of the introduction deals with La doble historia: problems in staging, critical reception in Spain, setting, dramatic structure, and technique, characters, and message. Written in 1964, the play premiered in Chester, England in 1968, but had to await Franco's death before finally opening in Spain in 1976. As Jordan states, it enjoyed an astonishingly long run of over 600 performances in Madrid alone.

Jordan provides a skillful analysis of the play, the story of Daniel Barnes, a National Security policeman who, after castrating a political prisoner and becoming impotent himself, consults a psychiatrist. The latter explains that since Daniel can never restore the prisoner's virility, he has destroyed his own. The play takes the form of a case history that the psychiatrist dictates and that is reenacted on stage. The drama opens as an elegantly dressed couple advise us that the story we are to see happened, if it happened at all, in some faraway country and has nothing to do with us. We later learn that this couple are patients and subjects of a prior case history that the doctor has just dictated. Their comments just after the play starts represent the beginning of Valmy's recollections.

Much of Barnes's story is presented through scenes in the psychiatrist's office in which the former narrates events taking place at police headquarters, including his torture of the prisoner Marty. Barnes's statements and those of Dr. Valmy constitute narrations within the larger narration that is the case history being dictated.

As Jordan shows, society's crass indifference is exemplified by the protests of the elegant couple at the beginning of the play. When this couple interrupt Valmy's dictation near the end of the play to protest again that the story is false, an orderly leads them away. The doctor then reveals that he told his second case history to a group of patients at the sanatorium and the couple called him a liar. Thus the theater is the sanatorium and the audience is the group of patients to whom Valmy told his story. Jordan notes that the first case history is even more important than Barnes's because in it we, the audience, are identified with these patients, and, if we do not accept the truth of Barnes's story, judged as guilty—and insane—as the elegant couple.

In addition to Jordan's excellent and scholarly introduction, which should prove most useful in literature courses, the edition contains helpful notes to the text, stimulating topics for discussion, vocabulary, and bibliography. However, the inclusion of a two-page plot summary that even reveals the play's ending, seems questionable—especially given the detailed discussion of action and characters in the introduction.

Additional coverage of Buero Vallejo's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vol. 106; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 24, 49, 75; Hispanic Writers, Vol. 1; and Major 20th-Century Writers, Vols. 1, 2.