The Public has a long, complex and compelling history. Drafted during his extended tour of the Americas in the late 1920s and early 1930s - the first pages of the original manuscript are written on the notepaper of the Union Hotel, Havana - it provoked intense reactions of confusion and alienation from its earliest readings.

Lorca himself claimed on more than one occasion to have no intention of putting the play before an audience. His friend Rafael Martínez Nadal recalls being told after one early reading of the manuscript that 'the work is very difficult and for the moment unperformable', and Lorca expanded on this theme in a newspaper article given to the Argentine newspaper La Nación in 1933:

As for the other work, which is entitled The Public, I don't expect to stage it in Buenos Aires or indeed anywhere else, because I don't believe there is a company that would put it on or an audience who would tolerate it without indignation. [...] Because it is the mirror of the audience. It parades on stage the personal dramas that each one of the spectators is thinking of, often without realising it, while they are watching the performance. And, since everyone's personal dramas are sometimes very shocking and generally nothing to be proud of, the spectators would immediately rise up in indignation and stop the performance. No, my piece is not a work to be performed: it is, as I have already termed it, 'a poem to be hissed at'.

Whether or not the play was intended for performance, it is certainly true that Lorca considered it exemplary of the kind of work he wished to produce in the theatre - 'the best I have written for the theatre', he told friends in 1931. Indeed, he was to explain to an interviewer in April 1936 that 'my true purpose is found in those impossible works'.

'True purpose' or not, The Public was certainly never staged, indeed never even fully published, during the author's lifetime. Four months later Lorca was dead, brutally executed by Nationalist partisans near Granada and thrown scenes an unmarked grave. There the story of The Public might have ended; it might have passed into literary history as a curio, two unfinished scenes publshed in an intellectual magazine.

However, on Lorca's last day in Madrid, 16th July 1936, he entrusted a package to Martínez Nadal with instructions to destroy it in the event of his death or disappearance. The package proved to contain, amongst other more personal papers, drafts of the five extant scenes of The Public. It is only owing to Martínez Nadal's decidedly economical interpretation of Lorca's request that the play survives: he decided that 'his instruction [...] could not have applied to that manuscript'.

Even then The Public was not immediately published. Martínez Nadal entrusted the manuscript to a friend in Spain and did not retrieve it until 1958, whereupon he was persuaded by Lorca's heirs not to publish until a more complete version of the play could be found. He remains convinced that at least two full versions existed, since he came into direct contact with both, but their fate in the aftermath of Lorca's death and the ongoing chaos of the Spanish Civil War is unclear.

In any case, Martínez Nadal agreed not to publish his manuscript but, after over ten years had passed with no complete version coming to light, he eventually published a study of the manuscript, with excerpts, in 1970, and an edition of the full surviving script in 1978, over forty years after its author's untimely death. Critical interest in this 'lost' play of Lorca's was, of course, immediate; but nevertheless it was several years before the work was staged professionally. A co-production between the Spanish Centro Dramático Nacional and the Italian Piccolo Teatro di Milano, it premiered at Madrid's Teatro María Guerrero in the winter of 1987. The tastes of theatrical audiences and the social acceptability of the play's subject matter had clearly changed in the fifty years since the play's composition and the production brought critical acclaim rather than public derision.

Excerpted from Nicholas Boalch, Opening the Theatre Beneath the Sand: Issues of Translation and Performance in Federico García Lorca's El público (Durham: University of Durham, 2005)