Silencio, estrenamos: el gran teatro del mundo bajo el espíritu del 12 de febrero

In 1974, the Minister of Information and Tourism, Pío Cabanillas, calls Adolfo Marsillach to return to TVE, where he was expelled in 1966. He wants him to write, direct and perform in a new television series. The idea is that his return and the series will be a sta-tement of what the Spirit of February 12 means. It is the name given to the promise to open up the regime that the president of the government, Arias Navarro, makes on that day in the Cortes. Marsillach shot a series that was both possibilist in content and Marxist in form, which he called Silencio, estrenamos. In the series: 1) He makes an anatomy of theatre in the late Francoist period that will have an impact on the actors' strike of February 1975; 2) he adopts a Brechtian poetics full of democratic didacticism; and 3) he makes a self-criticism of how the series itself has been filmed and how spectators and critics of all tendencies have recei-ved it: immobilists, opusdeists, reformers, rupturists... This metafictio-nal, dramaturgical and meta-serial content makes Silencio, estrenamos an unusual programme and an exemplary text to narrate the impossible reform, at that juncture, of the theatre and of the Great Theatre of the World that is the regime.