Clara Segura, Àlex Rigola, and Baró de Evel: all the names for the new season of the Lliure

BarcelonaThe Teatre Lliure will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2026, and it will do so with a season "that seeks to look outward, toward the world's crises and conflicts and the multitude of dilemmas facing contemporary society," says the theater's director, Julio Manrique. The Lliure's new program will consist of 28 productions, of which eight are its own, 10 are co-productions, and 10 are guest productions. "We feel that the season we are now closing has been a beginning, a seed of a new chapter in the history of the Lliure. With the next one, we want to strengthen, expand, and develop the identity of this new era," emphasizes Manrique. With a budget of €10.3 million for 2025, the public theater has concluded the current season with 88% occupancy and 119,000 spectators, 30,000 more than the previous season.

New Productions

The new season will open with the return of Àlex Rigola as director in a large-scale show. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which will feature fourteen actors on stage, including Nao Albet, Laia Manzanares, and Francesc Garrido. Albet will be at the Lliure twice: with Marcel Borràs, he will also adapt and direct the opera project The StunmenAnother of the great projects of the season is The ferryman, by Jez Butterworth, directed by Julio Manrique and featuring fifteen performers. "It's a very powerful play about the political conflict between Northern Ireland and England, which left many wounds and much violence," the director emphasizes.

As for small and medium-sized shows, the Lliure has programmed a new (and free) version of Women by the hand of Lucia del Greco, with Paula Jornet, Isabel Casanovas and Míriam Moukhles. Clara Segura will direct again —she already did so with The braid—, now with a text by Marc Artigau entitled A party in RomeThis is the story of a woman who begins to lose her memory and stars Marta Angelat and Xavier Boada. The book by Txell Feixas Brave women will be turned into a play directed by Glòria Balañá, who is preparing her adaptation with actors such as Moha Amazian and Manar Taljo.

Nausicaa Bonnín will be The author by Ella Hickson, a production directed by Anna Serrano about a young writer who wants to make a revolution, and Ferran Utzet will close the season at the Lliure de Gràcia with The son of the Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse starring Guillem Balart and Mercè Pons. Among the new productions at the Lliure is also a new project by Cabosanroque entitled One thousand three, say cheese and will put Mozart and Bad Bunny in dance, while Las Huecas will focus on the extreme right with Cannibal laughter, a piece that promises humor, politics, and resistance.

The Lliure production with students from the Institut del Teatre will be led by Carol López, who will direct Mangione's Manifesto, a play about the assassination of a US executive by a young man who becomes a media personality. The Lliure will also premiere Forced labor, a piece in Catalan sign language and performed with non-professional deaf interpreters by the company Ça Marche.

International performances

The Lliure will host major international productions, two of which will be part of the new festival. Autumn Flash: Fatal Coup, by Alain Platel, and The whole time, by Romina Paula. The director of the National Theatre of Strasbourg, Caroline Guiela Nguyen, will direct. Valentina, the story of a girl facing the dilemma of whether or not to tell her mother the truth. Two proposals will come from France: Lorraine de Sagazan will premiere in Barcelona The invisible life, about a man who lost his sight in an accident, and Mohamed El Khatib will explore old age with The secret life of the old, based on real testimonies that speak about desire, sexual life and love.

Belgian brothers Clément and Guillaume Papachristou will present Un tentative presque comme une another, a piece that combines dance and words to talk about their relationship as twins, marked by the fact that one of them has cerebral palsy. Two regulars on the Catalan theater scene will also be performing at the Lliure with two dystopias. The Uruguayan Gabriel Calderón—responsible for the magnificent Story of a wild boar— prepares Alas! Misery will make us happy. with a Catalan company formed by Pere Arquillué, Daniela Brown, Joan Carreras, and Laura Conejero. The play is "a dystopian philosophical comedy in which robots are the best actors in the world," says Manrique. And the Portuguese Tiago Rodrigues, current director of the Avignon Festival, will premiere his new creation The distance, about a father, who lives on Earth, and his daughter, who lives on Mars.

Two co-productions will arrive at the Lliure from Madrid. The third escape) allies with the director Andrea Jiménez to stage Against Antigone, a look at the Greek classic. The play "asks pertinent questions today" such as "who would Antigone be, who would be the enemy, who would represent the heart," Manrique notes. Likewise, the flamenco dancer Rocío Molina and director Pablo Messiez will present Heating, a piece that will be part of the Dansa Metropolitana program.

Returns and familiar montages

The Lliure season will feature three notable returns. The Baró d'Evel company will revive Who are we?, the visual poetry show that closed the Grec Festival last yearThere will be a new opportunity to see The day of the Watusi, he multi-award-winning show by Iván Morales starring Enric Auquer. "It will be an expanded and updated version of this heterodox and scoundrel work," Manrique reveals. The Lliure will also revive the Trilogy of the Millennial Condition by Miquel Mas Fiol, which could be seen at the Tantarantana between 2023 and 2024. "With a very punkish sense, it talks about the dilemmas and contradictions of his generation," emphasizes the director of the Lliure.

As for family programming, Aurora Bauzà and Pere Jou are preparing Dark, a piece about the fear of the dark for children ages five to nine. It can also be seen at the Lliure Kimu, the new proposal of the Marie de Jongh companyFinally, the Lliure will host part of El Petit, the early childhood festival organized by the Sabadell Theater.

Beyond the shows, the Lliure also promotes other initiatives and activities. For example, the dramaturgy course for people with disabilities taught by Claudia Cedó and a project led by Mohamed El Khatib, which will send artists to nursing homes to convert them into museums. Theatrical texts for six shows will also be published in Comanegra's Luz de Guardia collection. To celebrate the Lliure's 50th anniversary, the theater will hold all the celebratory events in the fall of next year and plans to obtain extraordinary grants to carry out the event.