Barcelona Plays

A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights

Barcelona’s theatre has experienced a remarkable renaissance in the years since the end of the Franco dictatorship. First, performance groups such as La Fura dels Baus, Els Joglars, Dagoll-Dagom, and la Cubana flourished with distinctive productions in which spectacle and movement predominated. In 1976, the Teatre Lluire began to set new production standards with a repertory or international plays. Soon the Catalan language, suppressed for more than three decades, became the vehicle of expression for new playwrights who challenged the performance groups with a “teatre de text”. The new plays in this collection represent outstanding playwrights of three generations. Benet i Jornet won his first drama award in 1963, when he was only twenty-three years old, and in recent decades he has become Catalonia’s leading exponent of thematically challenging and structurally inventive theatre. His plays have been performed internationally and translated into fourteen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi Belbel and Lluïsa Cunillé arrived on the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and provocative dramatic voices. The actor-director-playwright Pau Miró is a member of yet another generation that is now attracting favorable critical attention.

Translated and Edited by Marion Peter Holt & Sharon G. Feldman