Luis Bunuel was one of the great film-makers of the twentieth century. Gwynne Edwards analyses his work in the context of Bunuel's personal obsessions - sex, bourgeois values and religion. Luis Bunuel (1900-1983) was one of the truly great film-makers of the twentieth century. Shaped by a repressive Jesuit education and a bourgeois family background, he reacted against both, escaped to Paris, and was soon embraced by Andre Breton's official surrealist group. His early films are his most aggressive and shocking, the slicing of the eyeball in Un Chien andalou (1929) one of the most memorable episodes in the history of cinema. The Forgotten Ones (1950) and He (1952), made in Mexico, were followed, from 1960, in Spain and France, by the films for which he is best known: Viridiana (1961), Belle de jour (1966), Tristana (1970), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Gwynne Edwards analyses the films in the context of Bunuel's personal obsessions - sex, bourgeois values, and religion - suggesting that the film-maker experienced a degree of sexual inhibition surprising in a surrealist. GWYNNE EDWARDS is Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Yerma (meaning 'Barren') is one of three tragic plays about peasants and rural life that make up Lorca's 'rural trilogy'. It is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility. The woman's barrenness becomes a metaphor for her marriage in a traditional society that denies women sexual or social equality. Her desperate desire for a child drives her to commit a terrible crime at the end of the play. This Student Edition comes complete with a full introduction; plot synopsis; commentary on characters, context and themes; bibliography; chronology, and questions for study.

Blood Wedding is set in a village community in Lorca's Andalusia, and tells the story of a couple drawn irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage. This tragic and poetic play is the work on which his international reputation was founded. Like many of Lorca's passionate and intensely lyrical plays that focus on peasant life and the forces of nature, Blood Wedding combines innovatory dramatic technique with Spanish popular tradition. Methuen Drama Student Editions are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. As well as the complete text of the play itself, the volume contains a chronology of the playwright's life and work; an introduction giving the background to the play; a discussion of the various interpretations; notes on individual words and phrases in the text; and questions for further study.

Bernarda Alba is a widow, and her five daughters are incarcerated in mourning along with her. One by one they make a bid for freedom, with tragic consequences. Lorca's tale depicts the repression of women within Catholic Spain in the years before the war. The House of Bernarda Alba is Lorca's last and possibly finest play, completed shortly before he was murdered by Nationalist sympathisers at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Inspired by real characters and described by the author as 'a true record of village life', it is a tragic tale of frustration and explosive passions in a household of women rulled by a tyrannical mother. Edited with invaluable student notes - a must for students of Spanish drama

A detailed interpretation of nine of the Spanish director's films focuses on the style, technique and themes of his work.

Lorca, Bunuel and Dali were, in their respective fields of poetry and theatre, cinema, and painting, three of the most imaginative creative artists of the twentieth century; their impact was felt far beyond the boundaries of their native Spain. But if individually they have been examined by many, their connected lives have rarely been considered. It is these, the ties that bind them, that constitute the subject of this illuminating book. They were born within six years of each other and, as Gwynne Edwards reveals, their childhood circumstances were very similar. Each was affected by a narrow-minded society and an intolerant religious background which equated sex with sin and led all three to experience sexual problems of different kinds: Lorca the guilt and anguish associated with his homosexuality; Bunuel feelings of sexual inhibition; and, Dali virtual impotence. Having met during the 1920s at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, they developed intense personal relationships and channelled their respective obsessions into the cultural forms then prevalent in Europe, in particular Surrealism. Rooted in emotional turmoil, their work - from Lorca's dramatic characters in search of sexual fulfilment, to Bunuel's frustrated men and women, and Dali's potent images of shame and guilt - is highly autobiographical. Their left-wing outrage directed at bourgeois values and the Catholic Church was strongly felt, and in the case of Lorca in particular, was sharpened by the catastrophic Civil War of 1936-9, during the first months of which he was murdered by Franco's fascists. The war hastened Bunuel's departure to France and Mexico and Dali's to New York. Edwards describes how, for the rest of his life, Bunuel clung to his left-wing ideals and made outstanding films, while the increasingly eccentric and money-obsessed Dali embraced Fascism and the Catholic Church, and saw his art go into rapid decline.

Tirso de Molina was, with Lope de Vega and Calderon, one of the great dramatists of 17th century Spain, which produced a theatre as vital rich and as varied as its Elizabethan counterpart. The Trickster of Seville is thoroughly representative of the drama of Spain's Golden Age: a drama of fast-moving action which set its face against classical precepts, broke the unities of time and place, cheerfully mixed the serious and the comic, combined main and sub-plots, and cultivated Spanish subjects and Spanish characters. In this respect Tirso's Don Juan is of course, the most famous character in the drama of the Golden Age, as well as the first of a long line which extends through Mozart and Moliere to the 20th century.

A collection of extraordinary, playable translations from across the Latin American continent, including a new Mario Vargas Llosa play In La Chunga by Mario Vargas Llosa a young gambler down on his luck lends his girlfriend to the lady bar-keeper for the night to pay off a debt. Four years later the girl has neither been seen nor heard of, and the gamblers meet to speculate on the events of that fateful night. In Paper Flowers by Egon Wolff, Eva, a lonely middle class woman puts up a tramp for the night out of the kindness of her heart, only to find that he intends to occupy her life as well as her house, reducing her once and for all to his state. Medea in the Mirror by Jose Triana is an extraordinary re-setting of the Medea story in the Cuban revolution of 1959. As Maria, a young mulatto takes her revenge on Julian for abandoning her for someone else - the play becomes a mirror for the events that took place when Castro ousted the Batista regime.

These three tragedies were written at the height if Lorca's powers and display his innovative mix of Spanish popular tradition and modern dramatic technique. Blood Wedding tells the story of a couple drawn irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage; Dona Rosita the Spinster follows the appalling fate of a young woman beguiled into the expectation of marriage and left stranded for a lifetime whilst Yerma is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility. Set in and around his home territory, Granada, the plays return again and again to the lives of passionate individuals, particularly women, trapped by the social conventions of narrow peasant communities. The plays appear here in new playable translations.

Spain's most celebrated dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was murdered by Nationalist sympathizers shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. This volume shows the playwright at his provocative and poetic best and includes two of his most notorious works: "The Public," his only openly homosexual drama; and "Play Without a Title," a Pirandellian piece in which the blurring of stage and auditorium is combined with strong political overtones. Also included is Lorca's only historical play, the hauntingly lyrical "Mariana Pineda." "The Public" is translated by Henry Livings; the other two plays by Gwynne Edwards.

"Lorca is one of the few indisputably great dramatists of the twentieth century" Observer The Shoemaker's Wonderful Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplin use an old story of the old man married to the young wife to expose the social attitudes of a traditional Spain bound by rigid concepts of decency, reputation and honour. The Puppet Play deploys the puppets' uninhibited and passionate emotions as a direct attack on the 'tedious triviality' of commercial theatre. The Butterfly's Evil Spell explores the themes of love and frustration, while When Five Years Pass is a surrealist play with references to the film Un Chien Andalou [The Andalusian Dog] by Lorca's friend and collaborator, Luis Bunuel.

Three classic Spanish plays, made famous by Shakespeare and Webster Two of the most famous and successful playwrights of Spain's Golden Age of playwriting were Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and Rojas Zorrilla (1607-48). From their prodigious output, the three plays in this volume, based on similar sources to Shakespeare's and Webster's versions, provide a fascinating comparison with their Jacobean counterparts. Lope's The Duchess of Amalfi's Steward, in contrast to Webster's play, focuses on the nobility of love, with characters who are complex and appealing. His Romeo-and-Juliet story, The Capulets and Montagues, is a fast-moving mixture of serious and comic, with an ending that will surprise and entertain. Rojas' treatment of Cleopatra, with its rich imagery, emphasises the love theme, held within a knot of jealous relationships. A full introduction by Gwynne Edwards sets the plays in context and provides a thorough study of the individual works.

The political turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, together with the attendant cultural isolationism which Franco's repressive regime imposed upon the Spanish people has ironically fostered a strong tradition of subversive film makers dedicated to challenging the assumed realities of the status quo. Intent upon the ruthless exposure of hypocrisy and repression, the four Spanish directors, Bunuel, Saura, Erice and Almodovar have created a unique and distinctive body of work. Gwynne Edwards' Indecent Exposures gives the reader a first-class introduction to ten of their films, depicting a world where bourgeois values have collapsed, and the facades of good manners, political expediency and social propriety have all been thrown aside. Such cinema classics as Bunuel's Viridiana, Saura's Raise Ravens, Erice's Spirit of the Beehive and Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown are all analyzed in great depth, their major and minor themes discussed and set against both the social and political contexts of the time and the concerns reflected in the directors' own lives. Indecent Exposures is essential reading for anyone interested in Spanish cinema; perhaps one of the most vibrant and iconoclastic contributions to this twentieth-century medium.