On November 2, Miguel Signes Mengual, a playwright from the generation of 1950, died in Salamanca. He was born in Valencia in 1935, into a working family from the Marina Alta area of Alicante. In his long career, theater and politics have been two names for a unique passion. His beginning in theater writing can be dated to 1953, a year after he began studying Law in Valencia. His works are born from the notion of commitment, a category that belongs to aesthetics precisely because it seeks to disengage from any aestheticism. Signes has been, in addition to being a writer, a man of culture and an intellectual, two categories of the 20th century that some, like him, have maintained with heroic authenticity at the beginning of the 21st century.
Although he initially practiced law, he soon devoted himself entirely to literature. He grouped his first short pieces under two very significant headings: The social in five images y Those who govern cannot be seen. They are Antonio Ramos 1963 received the Albor award from the Friends of UNESCO Club, on whose jury José Monleón and Alfonso Sastre were there and it was performed for a month at the María Guerrero in Madrid, with Berta Riaza and María Luisa Ponte in the cast, coinciding with the massacre of the labor lawyers.
In Valencia he was director of the University Club on Comedias Street, where he had the collaboration of Broseta or Tomás y Valiente, and Joan Fuster. He was also Co-Director of the Valencian TEU. Between 1962 and 1967 he lived in Madrid and until 1969 in Oviedo. There he created the political agitation group “Teatro Documento”, published in the Notebooks of the Iberian Ring from Paris under the pseudonym José Romero Marcos and wrote several works, in addition to frequenting the contacts of the poet Ángel González and the philologist Emilio Alarcos.
Since the end of 1969 he has lived in Salamanca, where he has been a scholarship recipient of the Juan March Foundation, director of the Café Teatro La Latina and collaborator of the Salamanca Foundation. In this city it premiered at the Bretón theater and, at the Juan del Enzina, Mariano Acha’s dreamsdirected by Martín Memo, and writes about thirty works.
The Vietnam War, the situation of workers, the university world, the French Revolution and the Palestinian question have been some of its topics. Which did not prevent him from handling the codes of Marlowe and Shakespeare with irreverent ease, as he did in One more Eduardo, where he unravels the evil implicit in all forms of power.
She has participated for decades in the Association of Theater Authors, as a member of its board of directors, directing The doors of drama, and receiving the recognition of Honorary Member. He obtained the López Aranda award from the Santander City Council for A chair three euros. Jaime Siles, Ricardo Tordera and José Antonio Pérez Bowie have studied his work.
In addition to being an intellectual, Miguel Signes has been a cordial and sentimental man. He has been two things that do not always go hand in hand: a good man and a good man. He has been a good man within the framework of his ideals, with an aesthetic, ethical and political integrity that he has maintained until the end, without giving up empathy for others. As a good man, he has fulfilled Antonio Machado’s verse day after day. Two verses from his countryman Juan Gil-Albert go to him: “the land must be brief / to continue dreaming” and the words with which his granddaughter Micaela bid him farewell, in that Valencian that sounded sweet on the Castilian plateau: good night.