One of the most admirable achievements of Catalan playwrights in exile is their persistence in continuing to write theatre, despite knowing almost for certain that they would never see it performed in Catalonia. Ambrosi Carrion (Sant Gervasi de Cassoles, 1888–Cornellà de Conflent, 1973) was one of its foremost exponents. With about fifteen unpublished stage texts, Carrion also cultivated poetry and essay writing and built a literary career of over 30 works. Despite this, only one of his plays written in exile has been performed in Catalonia –La dama de Reus (Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, 2008)– and his name has remained in the shadows for decades. With the intention of making him present and vindicating him, Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona has published Teatre inèdit de l'exili, a volume containing three unpublished works by Carrion, prepared by professors Josep Camps Arbós and Francesc Foguet Boreu.

In a ramshackle old warehouse in South London, with a leaky pitched roof, a stylish but dilapidated bar with posters of past shows, a group of Americans gathered to make a musical about a famous American writer. It was a small show, Beautiful little fool, about the glamorous but tragic marriage of Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. It featured an experienced American director, American screenwriters, and an American producer who, although they first looked in the United States for places to stage an early production of this show, ultimately chose London for a simple reason: cost.

Cabosanroque's theatre (Laia Torrents and Roger Aixut) has eluded theatrical conventions by moving towards visual and sonic proposals that are very difficult to classify. A performative theatre that develops musicovisual artefacts playing with tempos and metrics, with sound and silence in fully contemporary scores and scenic spaces of strong plasticity. In their creative territory there is a deliberate absence of literature, although they have made shows about Verdaguer, Rodoreda and Brossa with little human presence. This changes in Mil tres, say cheese, a kind of stimulating contemporary opera based on the character of Don Juan and the music of Mozart.

The show L'herència, directed by Josep Maria Mestres and premiered at the Teatre Lliure last February, became this Monday the big winner of the 28th Critics' Awards for Performing Arts. The production has been awarded best show, best direction, and best supporting actor for Carles Martínez. In this year's edition, beyond L'herència, the awards have been widely distributed among the wide range of scenic proposals premiered in 2025. L'amor venia amb taxi by La Cubana has won the award for best musical and best costumes, Opereta imaginària by Albert Arribas has been recognized as best small-format play and best dramaturgy, while Leshi, by Atresbandes, has won in the new trends category. The Critics' Awards are organized by the digital platform Recomana and are chosen by active performing arts critics. This year, they were presented at a ceremony at the Centre Moral i Cultural del Poblenou.

I remember going shopping for clothes with my mother who had that habit of everything having to match, everything having to go together. There was that obsession with making sure any piece you bought matched the clothes you already had.This is no longer the case with your daughters. Do you have many arguments about clothes?

Until the 26th of this month, you have time to go to the Heartbreak Hotel theatre, in the heart of Sants, to see Return to Haifa, the magnificent adaptation of the story of the same name by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, which Àlex Rigola has adapted and directed, with a cast of four actors and actresses who offer literally impressive performances: Chantal Aimée, Jordi Figueras, Ariadna Gil and Carles Roig. Return to Haifa, the original story, is a testimonial novel that recounts the reunion of a mother and father with their son twenty years after they had to abandon him, when he was just a baby, due to the Nakba, that is, the expulsion of the Palestinians from their country, leaving behind all their belongings and also, often, their loved ones. This happened in 1948, just as the State of Israel was founded. The protagonist couple returns there twenty years later (Kanafani wrote the story in 1969; you can read it in Catalan in the translation by Anna Gil Bardají, published by Club Editor) to find their city again, their streets, their home, apparently as they left them, but now in the hands of the occupiers. And to meet their son. The break, the wound, is impossible to repair or heal.Return to Haifa, the play, brings all this to the stage with undeniable austerity and authority. As soon as the spectator enters the small room of the Heartbreak Hotel, they are greeted by Rigola and the four performers, and the director briefly presents the performance: he calls it theatre of urgency, conceived to provide an artistic response to one of the great political and human crises of our time: the genocide of Gaza perpetrated by the government and army of Israel in the face of the passivity, or acquiescence, or complicity, of the international community. It is literary theatre, text-based theatre: the actors and actresses serve the text scrupulously, while dramatizing it with a depth free of any affectation, at the antipodes of any temptation towards emphasis. To say that the result is breathtaking at several moments is accurate. The length of the play is just under an hour, but it reaches far and deep.The infamy of Gaza, of the West Bank, continues its course while the wars in Iran, in Lebanon, in a Middle East set ablaze by Netanyahu and Trump, two war criminals who have led the planet into a black hole full of destruction and corpses, partly for their own profit, partly for the profit of the elites who support them, partly for the delirium of the exercise of absolute and unpunished power, also continue. A little further on is Putin in Ukraine and, below, bleeding as always, Yemen, Somalia, the Congo. Faced with all this, closing oneself in one afternoon to see Return to Haifa in a theater like the Heartbreak, where everything is in close-up and where the actors cannot and do not want to hide (but neither can the spectators), may seem like a simply symbolic response. But it is not so: it is an active response, it means affirming ourselves in humanity and civilization in the face of atrocity and barbarism. And it is excellent theater, among the best that can be seen now.

With three decades of professional career behind him, actor Albert Triola (Mataró, 1973) knows the Catalan theater stages very well. He has worked with Dagoll Dagom, Guillem Clua, Sergi Belbel and Josep Maria Flotats and has been part of productions that have marked our country's billboard, such as Agost(2012) and Smiley (2014). Now he faces a new challenge, that of performing his first monologue. He does so directed by David Pintó in the production El lladre de llibretes, an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Gianni Solla about a helpless teenager in Mussolini's Italy. The production will be staged at the Versus theater until May 3.

The brief curriculum he has written, of little more than four lines, does not do justice to his professional career in the performing arts world, which is immense, not only for the large number of roles he has played, but also for the quality of the plays in which he has acted and for the excellence with which he has interpreted each of the characters. "Pep Cruz is theatre made man," critics have said of him. "An actor who does everything well," has also been written about him. "The most popular and beloved of the actors in the Catalan theatrical Olympus," others have added. Born in Girona in 1948 and forged as an actor in this city, Pep Cruz has worked, as a performer, as a director, or as a screenwriter in almost a hundred plays, including Cyrano de Bergerac, King Lear, Forido Pensil or Infantillajes; he has acted in 8 musicals, including the successful Mar i Cel; in 8 television series, such as Ventdelplà and Oh! Europa, and in more than thirty films.

Every two years, the National Theatre of Catalonia (TNC) invites companies that break with conventional norms and embrace risk to its facilities. "These are artists who perform a very important task in expanding the language of theatre," emphasizes TNC director Carme Portaceli. This gathering is part of the ZIP Festival and will take place this year from March 25 to 29. Under the coordination of Judit Pujol, the festival has programmed five productions that will unfold across various spaces within the theatre, from the Sala Tallers and the Sala Petita to the storage areas. To kick off ZIP, the company Atresbandes will premiere Impossible to imagine anything, a piece that draws on the current context of collapse to question uncertainty and emptiness. "It's like a cassette with an A-side and a B-side. The first is the impossibility of imagining anything, of groping in the dark about everything we're experiencing. And the second revolves around the impossibility of not imagining, because imagination is inherent to us," explains one of the company members, Albert Pérez Hidalgo.

There are a couple of hours left until a new performance ofThe ferryman At the Teatre Lliure de Montjuïc in Barcelona, ​​eleven-year-old Bruna Luz is restless and starts dancing before going on stage, while she waits for her turn to have her hair done, change, and put on her microphone. Beside her, ten-year-old Bruna Armengol joins in her games and laughs nonstop while waiting for the same. In a little while, they will become Mercy and Honor Carney, and their characters will travel to a rural area of ​​County Armagh in Northern Ireland. It will be a day in late August 1981, and the Carney family will be celebrating Harvest Day. But the festive family day will end in tragedy.

After the success of the musical Blood brothersThe Condal Theatre in Barcelona will host the comedy from March 19th A brilliant idea, by French author Sébastien Castro, starring Lluís Villanueva, Xavi Mira, Anna Azcona and Susanna Garachana (who also adapted the play), and directed by Xavier Ricart. "I'm especially excited to present A brilliant idea!"Because it contains two elements that make it a very interesting proposition. On the one hand, it's a company with professionals who are true experts in the genre and who have proven they have a firm grasp on the audience. On the other hand, this is a text that can already be considered a comedy classic; it has already triumphed in France and now arrives at the Condal stage," says Daniel Anglès, artistic director of the Teatre Condal, where the play will run until April 19. Xavier Ricart echoes Daniel Susanna Garachana's words regarding his adaptation work. He affirms that he didn't make a mistake with the casting and says he is "happy with the effort" they made, and he is grateful that the Teatre Condal allowed them to work in their space from day one. "It's not easy to do comedy; it requires surrounding yourself with a good team." "The comedy's only message is that people can come and enjoy themselves, have a good time, and forget about what's happening outside," Ricart explains.

Often, a vocational love for the theater awakens far from the trappings of grand premieres. Sometimes it springs from parents who are deeply involved in the arts. in amateur theatreOthers are found in school performances that leave even the most skeptical student speechless, or thanks to enthusiastic grandparents who, on Christmas afternoon, abandoned the dishes to wash and decided to take all their grandchildren to see the Pastorets (Christmas plays). These are small stories behind which lies a great Catalan playwright, director, or actor who saw the seed of theater sprout in the theater of their town or city. These spaces garner extraordinary public esteem, but paradoxically, they are the ones that receive the least investment, the least programming, and the least institutional support.

Ramon Madaula says that being a father is like playing seven and a half: you either go over or you go short. He most likely says this after many lost games (and just as many won), and that's why he wrote the play Loop, which is currently being performed at Espai Texas in Barcelona.

Babou Cham (Gambia, 1974) is a theater, film, and television actor. He can currently be seen on tour in The storm, from the company La Perla 29, on February 28 in Manacor, on March 6 in Reus, on March 14 in Tarragona and on March 15 in Igualada.

When he was three years old, his father left for England, but stopped halfway, in Mataró. "He was going to study in England, but he stayed temporarily in the Maresme region and started helping other people who were also coming here, and many of them did make it to England, and some to Sweden and Denmark."

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At the end of a sweltering May in 2025, a group of us were invited to one of the open rehearsals of the new show for all audiences at the Lleida-based company La Baldufa's venue. "It's a production that revolves around the Spanish Civil War," they told us. A soaring thermometer advised us to come prepared with fans. We were right! However, some of us thought we knew what to expect. Nothing could have been further from the truth!

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Actor Carles Martínez (Terrassa, 1966) has honed his craft and his passion remains undiminished. Since his debut in 1988, he has participated in nearly 150 shows, as well as several films and television series. A man primarily of the theater, he has just received the Butaca award for best supporting actor by The inheritance -considered The best show of 2025 by the ARA—. If there he shared the stage of the Teatre Lliure with 12 actors, now he returns teaming up with some twenty performers in The ferrymanA production directed by Julio Manrique about an Irish family experiencing a disappearance. "I've just finished a major production and I'm going on to do another one," says Martínez, aware that there aren't many shows of this scale on the Catalan stage. The ferryman It's a play by British playwright Jeff Butterworth, set in Northern Ireland in 1981. At the Lliure Theatre, it's being performed with a cast including Roger Casamajor, Marta Marco, Mima Riera, Ernest Villegas, and Anna Güell. It's one of the season's major premieres and will run from February 5th to March 15th. The text is also available in bookstores, published by Comanegra.

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Culture and social services. Theater and inclusion. Two areas severely lacking in public resources. If we add to this the fact that we're talking about Juneda, a town of 3,500 inhabitants in Les Garrigues, one could say that its continuity (never interrupted) is its greatest success.

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Catalan-language theater in the Valencian Community is experiencing turbulent times following a crisis at one of the pillars of Valencian dramaturgy. This crisis stems from the split between the El Micalet Choral Society—one of Valencia's main cultural venues—and the Teatre Micalet Company—which shares the same name because, since its inception 31 years ago, it has performed its own shows and those of other touring companies in the society's building. The two societies parted ways after negotiations to renew the theater's lease failed, explaining the situation with statements that included accusations of "expulsion," "eviction," and "lock changes" without warning. In practice, the decision, which must be ratified at an extraordinary meeting of the choir on February 6, could mean the disappearance of the city's only theater that chose to offer performances exclusively in Valencian.

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For Jérôme Wacquiez, artistic director of the French company Des Lucioles, theater is a mirror of the world. This underlying idea is present in many of his shows—some of which have been performed in Barcelona, ​​such as Deux not towards the stars (2018) and When will I open it? In 1001 years (2019) – and has also been the guide for his latest production, The clairière [The Clearing], with dramaturgy by Stéphane Jaubertie. "When we were young, we experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall as a very positive event, one that gave us hope and artistic inspiration. Almost 40 years later, how would we experience the fall of a similar wall in today's Europe? Would we have the same euphoria, faced with two territories uniting?" asks Wacquiez. To explore this possibility, The clairière It presents an idyllic residential complex where its inhabitants live secluded from the world, in a privileged setting. The tranquility is shattered when the wall protecting the residence from the outside world crumbles, leaving them with nothing to separate them from the forest beyond their homes.

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