Miguel Romero Esteo

Miguel Romero García, better known as Miguel Romero Esteo (born 1930, Montoro, Córdoba) is a Spanish writer and university professor, whose work is part of the so-called Spanish post-war theatre.

He was born in the Spanish town of Montoro (Córdoba) in 1930, and 1939 he moves to Málaga together with his family.

In his youth, he graduates in Madrid in Journalism and Political Science, and he studies other university studies in Philosophy, Theology and Economics. Moreover, he studies piano, organ and composition, knowledge which he expresses in the musicality of his texts.

He started his literary career in 1963, by writing poetry, novel and plays which were systematically prohibited by censorship. Due to his grotescomaquias during the decades of 1960s and 1970s, and always in the field of avant-garde theatre, Romero Esteo is considered as an eccentric and enfant terrible due to the scandals caused by his works. Along with Antonio Martínez Ballesteros, he configured the Young generation drama of the protest theatre and critical to the political system, within the so-called New Spanish Theatre.

His second work, Pontifical, which he sent to the New Theatre Festival of Sitges, in 1966, caused a heated fight in the jury among the loyals to the Francoist regime and neoliberals. This 450-page grotescomaquia would overstep all the time limits of a play with a duration of eight hours. Its immediate prohibition by censorship helped Pontifical to secretly move around among students in duplicate copies and to become a symbol of the oppressed protest theatre.

In 1967 he worked as an editor in the Madrilenian newspaper Nuevo Diario, from which, through his articles, he helped the authors and the most innovating trends of worldwide dramaturgy become known in Spain.

In 1972 he premieres in the New Theatre Festival of Sitges the play Paraphernalia de la olla podrida, la misericordia y la mucha consolación, a show which was subsequently taken to Paris, in the frame of the 1st anti-Franco Week of the University of Sorbonne, and in 1973 he premieres Pasodoble at the Teatro Alfil during the New Theatre Festival of Madrid. Both plays are performed throughout the national territory for several years.

In the decade of the 1980s he combined his job as a university professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Málaga with his job as an author of theatre plays and stage director.

With the performance of El vodevil de la pálida, pálida, pálida rosa, Romero Esteo premiered for the first time in a Spanish commercial theatre –it was at the Teatro Jacinto Benavente in March 1981.

Between 1983 and 1984 he was the director of Málaga International Theatre Festival.

In 1985, he was awarded from Strasbourg the Europe Prize for his work, published in 1983, Tartessos.

On 15 July 1995 his play Pasodoble was performed in the hall Strassenbahndepot of Berlin.

In 2001, during a talk of the 15th Congress of Contemporary Spanish Literature titled “Teatro y antiteatro. La vanguardia del drama experimental” (Theatre and Anti-theatre. The avant-garde of experimental drama), he confirmed a rumour that harassed him: Romero Esteo was once proposed for the Nobel Prize in Literature, ironically annotating that “bigger cretins had been awarded that prize”.

On 20 October 2008 he would achieve the Spanish National Prize for Dramatic Literature, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture for his work Pontifical, forty-two years after sending it to that New Theatre Festival in 1966.

Romero Esteo cultivated the dramatic genre, but also he often approached the essay and more occasionally to poetry and novel.

The Spanish linguist and academician Fernando Lázaro Carreter said about Romero Esteo’s work that he “had never seen our theatre go such a long way, neither in such an audacious and intelligent manner” and that “in some of Romero Esteo’s works we can find some of the greatest summits ever of European literature”.

• El romancero de la mar y los barcos. Poemario del mar.
• Pizzicato irrisorio y gran pavana de lechuzos (Grotescomaquia), author’s edition, Madrid, Cátedra, 1978. Written in 1961.
• Pontifical (Grotescomaquia), Madrid, Asociación de Alumnos de la R.E.S.A.D. y Ditirambo Teatro-Estudio, 1971, 2 vols. Underground edition. Pontifikale (German version), Fráncfort. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971. Written in 1966.
• Patética de los pellejos santos y el ánima piadosa (Grotescomaquia) Málaga, M.H.S, 1997. Written in 1970.
• Pasodoble (Grotescomaquia), in Primer Acto, 162, November (1973). Written in 1971.
• Paraphernalia de la olla podrida, la misericordia y la mucha consolación (Grotescomaquia) (incomplete edition) in Estreno, Cincinnati University Press, March (1975). Written in 1971.
• Fiestas gordas del vino y el tocino (Grotescomaquia) Madrid, Júcar, 1975. Written between 1972 and 1973.
• El vodevil de la pálida, pálida, pálida, pálida rosa. Madrid, Fundamentos, 1979. Written in 1975.
• Horror vacui (Grotescomaquia). Written between 1974 and 1983.
• La oropéndola (Tragicomedy). Play written in the 1980s for television.
• Tartessos (Tragedy), Pipirijaina Revista de teatro y la Diputación de Málaga, Madrid, 1983.
• Liturgia de Gárgoris, rey de reyes (Tragedia), Málaga, Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación, 1987.

• Spanish National Prize for Dramatic Literature (2008)
• Andalucía Prize of Theatre (1992)
• Enrique Llovet Theatre Prize for Liturgia de Gárgoris, rey de reyes (1987)
• Council of Europe Prize, through the Venice Biennial in its 33rd International Theatre Festival, for Tartessos (1985)
• Pablo Iglesias Theatre Prize for Tartessos (1984)

• Adopted son of the town of Málaga (2012)
• Adopted son of the province of Málaga (2000)