Half an impassioned argument for a new, less ideologically sterile form of theatre, and half a bitter indictment of a society that arbitrarily condemns and mutilates certain forms of love, The Public finds Federico García Lorca at his most raw, passionate, and controversial.

Radical in its indictment of shallow commercial theatre and the anodyne public that fed it, it makes no concessions to the comfort of its audience and acts both as a proposition for and example of a different kind of theatre. At the same time it is, in its impassioned defence of all manifestations of love, an astonishingly daring work when situated in the context of prevailing attitudes towards homosexuality in the Spain of the early twentieth century.

At its most basic level The Public is a play about theatrical experimentation. The Director of the Theatre of the Open Air, fresh from the success of his production of Romeo and Juliet, is challenged by three passionate, sinister visitors to put on a new form of theatre. This 'Theatre Beneath the Sand' will communicate a reality that the Director's theatre has hitherto avoided. His fearful reluctance overcome, the Theatre Beneath the Sand is staged.

But The Public does not concern itself only with the nature of theatrical expression. Just as the Theatre Beneath the Sand demands the revelation of hidden truths in the theatre, so it forces the exposure of socially unpalatable 'forbidden' forms of love and sex. As the dramatic action builds in a bitter-beautiful spiral of overlapping levels of reality and consciousness, the protagonists find their layers of pretence stripped from them as their private desires, personal dramas and concealed sexualities are ruthlessly displayed.

The brutal denouement, in which the staging of the Theatre Beneath the Sand collapses into violence, rioting and death as the audience revolt and attack the company, is a fierce challenge to a public ideologically unprepared to accept anything more challenging than theatrical cliché and a society whose intolerance and arbitrary strictures entangle certain relationships with guilt and humiliation.