Sixto Paz returns to the Borràs Theatre with his most over-the-top comedy

BarcelonaSixto Paz gathered, in 2025, more than 50,000 spectators with the play La presència, a thriller with supernatural touches that filled the Teatre Borràs for two seasons. Now the company led by Pau Roca returns to the same venue with La promesa, a production of radically different tone and genre, although it shares part of the authorship of that success. Yago Alonso wrote La presència with Carmen Marfà (with whom he had also created the hilarious Ovelles), and on this occasion the playwright has teamed up with Sílvia Navarro to create La promesa, a delirious comedy about a group of friends who reunite at a party. The show will be performed in Barcelona from May 23 to July 12, and from January it will tour Catalonia.

"It's the most over-the-top, wild, and irreverent comedy we've ever made," says Roca, who directs the production. La promesa begins with a night of partying among five friends in their forties who were young in the nineties. They have all known each other since childhood because they went to scouts together, a place that educated them in a series of values such as solidarity, respect for nature, and empathy, which they now seem to have forgotten. Through humor, the show poses two big questions. How do we distance ourselves throughout life from the ideals we had when we were younger? Would our adolescent self be proud of us?

The cast of the show is led by Carol Rovira, who plays Paula, a woman who has just returned from Brazil after a transformative journey. She is the hostess of the party, who invites them to attend dressed as icons from the nineties and who will be the lynchpin of the show: when the party is already underway and hits like Wanabe by the Spice Girls and Saturday night by Whigfield have played, Paula will confess to her friends that she has poisoned them. "She does it out of love. She loves them so much that she decides to turn the party into a kind of moral ritual and ask them the same questions she asked herself on that inner journey," points out Rovira.

A toxic friendship

The four friends suffering from Paula's poisoning are played by Edu Buch, Mercè Martínez, Marc Rodríguez, and Eduardo Lloveras. "They all have a rather toxic relationship, they interact based on little jabs and not on flattery or care. My character is the prime example of this," summarizes Martínez. The rest of the group members are a hypochondriac lawyer (Rodríguez), an ambitious, upper-class man who works in radio (Lloveras), and a businessman paired with a 26-year-old girl who is about to become a father (Buch).

"They are frivolous and individualistic characters, but at the same time intelligent, brilliant, and incisive. They say things as tall as a bell tower and, at the same time, we want to be with them because they make the comedy explode," points out Roca. Although humor is the main vehicle of the story, the director defends that beneath the comedy there is a disguised criticism of individualism in our society. "Each character occupies a wealthy and comfortable position, very disconnected from reality. All of them move with a point of cynicism and with a certain dehumanization towards others," notes Roca.