Los zapatos de fierro

Emilio Carballido is known primarily as a playwright and one of the leaders of a movement that revitalized Mexican theater during the 1950s and 1960s. Previously, Mexican theater had been derivative of European models. Carballido is responsible for breaking from the traditional realistic drama and introducing a surrealistic, fantastic world (one to which the Mexican novel had already turned) into the theater. At the same time, Carballido probes the nature of reality and of human responsibility. The play Theseus in the volume The Golden Thread (1957), is a twentieth-century version of the Greek myth, in which Theseus takes full responsibility for his actions. Theseus willfully neglects to put up the white sail of victory on his return from killing the Minotaur so that his father will hurl himself from the Parthenon and he will become king. The Clockmaker from Cordoba is a wryly comic vision of the fallibility of justice and the weakness of humankind. Like all Carballido's work, ultimately The Clockmaker from Cordoba expresses an abiding faith in a weak but essentially striving humanity.