Echoes of the civil war in the plays of Carmen Conde, Amanda Junquera, María Zambrano, Nieves Rodríguez and Paula Paz1

This article addresses the need to listen to the female voices that embody the trauma of conflict and exile in the underexplored area of Spain’s civil-war-themed theatre by women. It does so by positing listening as an aesthetic, ethical and political practice. In Tras de la perdida gente (‘In the wake those lost’) (1986) co-authored by Carmen Conde and Amanda Junquera and La tumba de Antígona ( Antigone’s Tomb ) by María Zambrano (1967), the playwrights highlight the need for attentive listening in texts that are predicated on the imperative of being aware of the depth of pain that conflict inflicts on the self and others. The article references Carolyn Birdsall and Elinor Carmi’s feminist approach of ‘listening in’ to amplify silenced histories of women in theatre (2022). In addition to plays by Conde and Junquera, the article also considers how the recent productions, La tumba de María Zambrano (‘María Zambrano’s Tomb’) (2018) by Nieves Rodríguez, and Paula Paz’s El sillón K: Cartas desde el olvido (‘Chair K: Letters from Oblivion’) (2025), project these writers’ voices, together with the anti-war sentiment their plays convey, to twenty-first-century audiences.