The Billy-Club Puppets

The Billy-Club Puppets (Los títeres de cachiporra) is a play for puppet theatre by the twentieth-century Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca. It was written between 1922 and 1925. It is about a beautiful heroine named Rosita who falls in love with a poor boy named Cocoliche, but has to marry Don Cristóbal, a rich old, lazy lump with a big billy club. Meanwhile, there are bar fights, some mean smugglers, and Fígaro and Wearisome discover a deep, dark secret about Don Cristóbal. He gave it the subtitle "Tragi-comedy of Don Cristóbal and Miss Rosita: A Guignolesque farce in six scenes and an announcement." Don Cristóbal is a kind of Punch character (which itself was based on Pulcinella), who also appears in García Lorca's other, later puppet play, The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal (written in 1931).