Haunting Ghosts: The Return of the Past in the Contemporary Spanish Stage

This essay explores the role of spectral characters in two contemporary Spanish plays dealing with Spain's postwar years and Franco's dictatorship. Los ninos perdidos, by Laila Ripoll, takes place in an orphanage where three children from the Republican side have been confined by the Francoist welfare system since the end of the war. The close relationship between memory and the ghost is also evident in "El espectro de la estacion de Atocha", by Fernando Marias, whose monologue delves into one of Spain's last colonial wars in Sidi Ifni, a former North African enclave of Spain that was returned to Morocco in 1969.