In 1784 Schiller wrote of the jurisdiction of the stage beginning ‘where the domain of secular law leaves off’. At a time when the faultlines of Spain’s young democracy seem particularly exposed and its political parties have appeared unable (or unwilling) to tackle the legacy of a ten year recession, widescale political corruption and the implications of a transition to democracy that failed to dismantle the structures of sociological Francoism, it has been culture that has attempted to provide an alternative space for justice. In this paper I examine two theatrical pieces, El pan y la sal (Bread and Salt, 2018) and Jauría (Pack, 2019) that have sought to provide public sites for the discussion of two trials that have mobilised public opinion in Spain. First, the 2012 trial of Investigating Judge Baltasar Garzón at Spain’s Supreme Court for ‘prevarication’, accused by a right-wing trade union of intentionally violating a 1977 Amnesty Law that forbids any investigation of crimes related to the Franco regime. Second, the case of la manada (the wolfpack, 2017-19), a group of five men from Seville accused of raping an 18-year old woman from Madrid in the hallway of a building in Pamplona during the San Fermín celebrations. In discussing the ways in which each of these cases has been ‘restaged’ in the public arena, I will examine the wider implications of their legacy – issues of cultural heritage, accountability and immunity, and questions about constitutional politics and the role culture can play in challenging both a state-endorsed politics of amnesia and the wider nostalgia for Francoism (and its curtailment of civil liberties and equalities) evidenced in the rise of Vox, the extreme right-wing party that now holds 52 seats in Spain’s Parliament.
