La Celestina Questions the Theatrical Code: Alfonso Sastre's Tragedia fantastica de la gitana Celestina (1978)

The Spanish playwright Alfonso Sastre wanted to turn the theatre of his era into a social criticism medium. Within the context of his dramatic works, he created a series of strategies of detachment that revealed to the spectators the apparatus of the performance in order to encourage them to look for the sense of the construction taking place in front of their eyes. In Tragedia fantastica de la gitana Celestina, the aforementioned strategies focus on Rojas's classical text. The present study analyses how Sastre uses the characters and the cues from La Celestina to produce metatheatrical approaches that deal with the characters' identity as well as the comments or the dialogues, and that cause the process of mise en abyme of the theatrical works.