KEY FACTS: The Tricycle (Le Tricycle) — 1953 by Fernando Arrabal

 

KEY FACTS: The Tricycle (Le Tricycle) — 1953 by Fernando Arrabal 

Full Title: The Tricycle (Le Tricycle), originally titled Los hombres del triciclo (“The Tricycle Men”).

Author: Fernando Arrabal (1932–2024), Spanish-born playwright, novelist, poet, and filmmaker.

Type of Work: A one-act experimental stage play belonging to Arrabal’s early dramatic period. The work was written in Spanish and later translated into French.

Genre: Absurdist / avant-garde tragicomic drama, with elements of surrealism, dark comedy, and what some sources describe as magic realism.

Language: Originally Spanish; the French version is Le Tricycle. Arrabal wrote in both Spanish and French during his career.

Time and Place Written: Written in Madrid, Spain, around 1952–1953. Sources differ slightly about the precise year of composition; Arrabal himself consistently associated the work with 1953.

Date of First Publication: 1958, in French, according to available documentation.

Publisher: Julliard, Paris, for the French publication.

Tone: The tone is playful, childlike, comic, strange, dark, disturbing, and ultimately tragic. Arrabal places innocent games and apparently humorous situations alongside poverty, crime, violence, and death.

Setting (Time): The play is set in a contemporary/unspecified period corresponding broadly to the social world in which the characters live. It does not establish a precise historical date.

Setting (Place): An impoverished, marginal urban environment in Spain, centred on the limited world inhabited by Climando, Apal, and Mita.

Protagonist: The play does not have a conventional single protagonist. Climando and Apal function as the principal male characters, while Mita is the central female character. Together they form the dramatic centre of the play.

Major Conflict: The major conflict arises from the characters’ poverty, social marginalization, and desperate desire to preserve their way of life, particularly their dependence on the tricycle. Their attempt to obtain security leads them toward a serious crime and ultimately brings them into conflict with the consequences of their actions.

Rising Action: Climando and Apal struggle with poverty and depend upon their tricycle for survival. Their small world is disrupted and complicated by Mita’s presence. As their economic difficulties increase, they become increasingly desperate to protect their livelihood and improve their circumstances. Their desperation eventually leads them toward a criminal solution.

Climax: The climax occurs when the characters’ desperate plan to secure their future reaches its decisive point and the consequences of their violent action become unavoidable. The playful world they have created can no longer protect them from reality.

Falling Action: After the decisive action, the characters must face the consequences of what they have done. Their hopes of preserving their simple life collapse, and the authorities and external social reality close in upon them.

Themes: The principal themes include poverty and deprivation, social alienation, friendship, loneliness, innocence, childhood and play, imagination and escapism, dreams versus reality, freedom and entrapment, violence, death, and the absurdity of human existence.

Motifs: Important recurring motifs include games and childish behaviour, the tricycle, money, poverty, movement, escape, imagination, companionship, repetition, and the contrast between comedy and tragedy.

Symbols: The most significant symbol is the tricycle, which represents livelihood, movement, hope, and the desire for escape, while also suggesting the characters’ inability to make genuine progress. Games symbolize innocence and escape; money symbolizes survival and desperation; and death symbolizes the ultimate collapse of the characters’ fragile imaginary world.

Foreshadowing: The play’s poverty, repeated references to money and survival, dependence upon the tricycle, and the characters’ increasingly desperate attitude foreshadow the criminal act and tragic consequences that follow. The contrast between their childish games and the harsh reality surrounding them also prepares the audience for the destruction of their seemingly innocent world.

Note on Dates: There is some bibliographical variation concerning the work’s composition. Scholarly sources place its composition around 1952–1953, while Arrabal is commonly credited with 1953 as the date of Le Tricycle. Its first French publication is documented as 1958 by Julliard.