Every year, on World Theatre Day, a leading Spanish playwright is elected to drape a white scarf round the statue of Ramón Maria del Valle-Inclán, which stands on one of Madrid's main thoroughfares, the Paseo del Prado. It is a simple ceremony, emphasising the special place held by Valle in that process of the rehabilitation of the neglected figures of the past, which has been the principal saving grace of the theatre of post-Franco Spain. Here was a dramatist who declared himself as "outside the theatre," who insisted that he wrote his plays without a thought for whether they were performable or not, and much of whose work, for nearly forty years after his death in 1936, was condemned to almost inevitable silence. But a swirl of recent productions of his plays, both inside and outside Spain, along with dramatisations of the odd novel, have belatedly confirmed Valle-Inclán’s reputation on stage as one of the most innovative of twentieth-century playwrights.