| Miguel Romero Esteo | |
| Birth Date: | 1930 |
| Birth Place: | Montoro, Córdoba, Spain |
| Occupation: | Writer, University Professor |
Miguel Romero García, better known as Miguel Romero Esteo (1930 – 29 November 2018),[1] was a Spanish writer and university professor, whose work is part of Spanish post-war theatre movement.[2]
He was born in the Spanish town of Montoro (Córdoba) in 1930, and 1939 he moved to Málaga with his family.
In his youth, Estero studied Journalism and Political Science. He also studied piano, organ, and musical composition.
He began his literary career in 1963, with poetry, a novel, and several plays which were systematically prohibited by censorship. Due to his grotescomaquias during the decades of 1960s and 1970s, Romero Esteo was considered as an eccentric due to the scandals caused by his works. Along with Antonio Martínez Ballesteros, he configured the Young generation drama of the protest theatre and critical to the political system, within the so-called New Spanish Theatre.
His second work, Pontifical, which he sent to the New Theatre Festival of Sitges in 1966, caused a heated fight in the jury among the loyals to the Francoist regime and neoliberals. This 450-page grotescomaquia would overstep all the time limits of a play with a duration of eight hours. The play's immediate prohibition by censorship helped Pontifical secretly circulate among students in duplicate copies and become a symbol of the oppressed protest theatre.
In 1967, he began working as an editor in the Madrilenian newspaper Nuevo Diario, from which, through his articles, he helped the authors and the most innovating trends of worldwide dramaturgy become known in Spain.
In 1972 he premiered Paraphernalia de la olla podrida, la misericordia y la mucha consolación, a show which was subsequently taken to Paris. In 1973, he premiered Pasodoble at the Teatro Alfil during the New Theatre Festival of Madrid. Both plays are performed throughout the national territory for several years.
In the 1980s, he combined his job as a university professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Málaga with his job as an author of theatre plays and stage director.
With the performance of El vodevil de la pálida, pálida, pálida rosa, Romero Esteo premiered for the first time in a Spanish commercial theatre –it was at the Teatro Jacinto Benavente in March 1981.
Between 1983 and 1984 he was the director of Málaga International Theatre Festival.
In 1985, he was awarded from Strasbourg the Europe Prize for his work, published in 1983, Tartessos.
On 15 July 1995 his play Pasodoble was performed in the hall Strassenbahndepot of Berlin.
On 20 October 2008, he won the Spanish National Dramatic Literature Award, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture for his work Pontifical, forty-two years after sending it to that New Theatre Festival in 1966. [3]
Romero Esteo cultivated the dramatic genre, but also he often approached the essay and more occasionally to poetry and novel.
The Spanish linguist and academician Fernando Lázaro Carreter said about Romero Esteo's work that he “had never seen our theatre go such a long way, neither in such an audacious and intelligent manner” and that “in some of Romero Esteo's works we can find some of the greatest summits ever of European literature”.