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- Ernesto Caballero
Ernesto Caballero
- Personal information
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Surname: Caballero
First name: Ernesto
Born: 1957, Madrid, Spain
- Biography
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Ernesto Caballero (1957) is a contemporary playwright whose work has been well-received both nationally and internationally. He graduated from Madrid’s drama school, the RESAD, in 1983. Shortly after this he helped found the theatre journal Teatra, alongside the highly-respected Spanish playwright, Fermín Cabal. In 1991 Caballero returned to the RESAD as a lecturer in Performance Studies. He has collaborated with a number of theatre companies, establishing his own, Teatro el Cruce, in the early 1990s. As a playwright Caballero has won a number of awards, including the Crítica Teatral de Madrid Prize for best author during the 1993-4 Madrid theatre season for his plays Auto (1991) and Rezagados (Stragglers, 1992). He is also a highly-successful theatre director, awarded, for example, the José Luis Alonso prize in 1989 for his production of Eco y Narciso (Echo and Narcissus) by the seventeenth-century playwright, Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Caballero frequently directs his own plays and those of contemporaries, such as Juan Mayorga, for whom he directed the critically acclaimed production of La tortuga de Darwin (Darwin’s Tortoise) in 2008.
- Themes
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Caballero’s theatre is often comic, but it nevertheless explores the darker aspects of modern life. It has been described as ‘a clinic – a laboratory in which we all suffer from the same illness – society’ (Vizcaíno 1993: 30).
Vizcaíno, Juan Antonio. 1993. ‘El teatro clínico de Ernesto Caballero’, Primer Acto, 251, 28-33 (in Spanish)
- Style
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Many of Ernesto Caballero’s plays take place in realistic settings and feature small casts. In terms of his characterisation, he has been commended for ‘his innate ability to create characters bursting with humour, irony, sarcasm and tenderness’ (Vizcaíno 1993: 29).
Vizcaíno, Juan Antonio. 1993. ‘El teatro clínico de Ernesto Caballero’, Primer Acto, 251, 28-33 (in Spanish)
- Plays in the database
- Useful reading and websites
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Vizcaíno, Juan Antonio. 1993. ‘El teatro clínico de Ernesto Caballero’, Primer Acto, 251, 28-33 (in Spanish)
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Entry written by Gwynneth Dowling. Last updated on 19 June 2011.
