La Zaranda, Teatro Inestable de Ninguna Parte, celebrates its fortieth anniversary with the annual appointment at the Romea by the will of its until now director Josep Maria Pou and in attention to the group of fans that have followed them for so many years. And the fact is that La Zaranda's theater is so peculiar and different from everything that can be seen on stage... A theater stripped of artifices that makes virtue of simplicity and that draws from the classics without performing them. A theater in which the creation of a singular world prevails, crossed by an almost existentialist poetics and inhabited by losers. Displaced characters like Beckett's clowns who do not know what to do or how to do it but who continue with inherited routines. Characters of great pathos like these angels that Eusebio Calonge has imagined and that could just as well inhabit a corner of the Spanish picaresque of the Golden Age as the London neighborhood of Mackie the Knife, from The Threepenny Opera, or the suburbs of a modern city. Through the black space of All the angels took flight –occupied only by four large old books, which will finally be the martyrs' tombstone, a bed frame, a box of Imperial beers and plenty of blankets– walk a robber and drug dealer named Virgilio (Gaspar Campuzano), the Romanian prostitute Micaela (Ingrid Magrinyà), the also prostitute and junkie Alacrana (Natalia Martínez), the pimp Paco Cadena (Enrique Frutos) and Ramonet (Francisco Sánchez), a poor “fool” who speaks little but quotes Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.

It is logical that a good part of the audience that goes to the theater looks for entertainment with laughter that does not make them think. It is no longer so logical that the billboard is filled with this type of theater, ignoring proposals that invite one to ask questions and talk about what has been seen. As you can imagine with this preamble, A small distortion is a proposal from the latter, like almost all the theater of Enric Nolla. A theatre that avoids conventional logic and approaches the dark corners of the human being, as is evident in his dramaturgical debut, Hurricane (2000), passing through White slave trade (2001) and ending with this A small distortion, in which he reflects on the creation of masculinity in our society, making it very clear with the title that it is the author himself who poses the question. And he does so with the help of a character of those who take the air bridge in first class, who have a closet full of ties. A self-satisfied winner who despises the weak and hates failure in a clear critique of a model with Trump-like airs. And the fact is that Nolla's theater is neither innocuous nor kind; it avoids the obvious and responds to the restlessness of someone who confronts an ungraspable world often prone to destruction. We find the protagonist in a luxurious penthouse with impressive views of the city, while he prepares the speech he is to deliver at the company party that has just awarded him the management of an international delegation.

Theater usually tells stories, but there is theater that also asks questions, that demands the spectator to define themselves in front of what they are seeing or have just seen. This is the case of Don't look, the new production by the performing arts and audiovisual collective Cultura i Conflicte. Once the performance is over, spectators can access a cubicle installed in the lobby of the Gothic hall of the Biblioteca de Catalunya and answer the questions that have emerged throughout the proposal. Would you continue to love your father if you found out he had been a torturer and murderer? Would you tolerate someone's torture to save your child?

The premiere of La belle Hélène at the Teatre Lliure directed by Pere Planella in 1979 constituted the first great popular success for the company that had opened the Gràcia theatre three years earlier with Camí de nit. Miquel Mas Fiol's proposal which commemorates the fifty years of the Lliure moves away from Offenbach's operetta to build a heartfelt and quite entertaining tribute to the founders and their way of working and living theatre.

Tradition says that the essence of theatre lies in a stage with a performer and a chair. Nothing else is needed. An idea that, if there is a Barcelona theatre that explores it, it is Àlex Rigola's Heartbreak Hotel, which makes a virtue of scenic minimalism. It returns now with the magnificent theatrical game that Sergi Belbel wrote some years ago and which won two awards (Ciutat de València 2022 and Critics' Award of Valencian writers) but which had never been premiered: She and Machine. An actress and an actor and a chair embraced by the splendid lighting of Kiko Planas in an empty space.

A good story and a great performer. Nothing else is needed to achieve a great theater performance. In this case, it is the story of the childhood and adolescence of the actor, director, and writer Fernando Fernán Gómez, adapted by the man who was his friend and collaborator for years, José Sacristán. A Sacristán who, it must be said, at 88 years old fills the theater with a clear diction full of nuances that can be heard perfectly until the very last row. It is a sincere and heartfelt tribute to his friend by a Sacristán who, at this stage of the journey that is life, has made the theater a territory of reality and pleasure. A Sacristán who does not need great scenography or theatrical machinery. A chair and a cushion (which he says was his grandmother's), a kind of trunk, a lamp, and the fall of a piece of curtain evoke a space of creation and life.

The worship of beauty and narcissistic vanity are now very present in society through the world of social networks. You are as you are seen. And you must always be seen well. It's not about making a pact with the devil to preserve youth, but with personal trainers and cosmetic shops to groom yourself.

Tall, agile, well-built, attractive, furious, violent, histrionic, clownish. And without a hump. This is Shakespeare's Richard III as imagined by Calixto Bieito, which has been at the Grec Festival in a 2025 production by Buenos Aires' Teatro San Martín, starring actor Joaquín Furriel, whom Calixto Bieito had already directed in 2010 in a version of "Life is a dream of Calderón de la Barca.

All festivals are creative and playful spaces where very diverse proposals coincide that are difficult to see in the regular seasons of theaters. Differences that not only have to do with their artistic quality, but with the objective, with the capacity to produce emotions, to reflect ourselves and the society in which we live or even simply to entertain us, but also with the means of production to bring them to life and which often reflect other cultural and economic differences. It was only two days ago that the Fabià Puigserver hall of the Teatre Lliure received Florentina Holzinger, one of the stars of European radicality, with a show (Ophelia’s got talent) in which nothing was spared and where even a life-size helicopter appeared. And three days later in the small Espai Lliure a Mexican company brought us a simple but committed political view on the perversion of the capitalist system in Mexico, extensible throughout depressed societies in the line of what the writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano analyzed and denounced in Las venas abiertas de América Latina.My mother and money raises the difficulty, or almost the impossibility, for the lower classes outside the privileged West to access a dignified life, despite working tirelessly. This is the real case of Josefina Orlaineta, mother of actor and playwright Anacarsis Ramos. Why, at 66 years old and having worked all her life, does my mother live in poverty?, Ramos asks himself. And that's why he convinced her to explain her life experience with work and money. So, the enterprising Josefina added acting to her work history with more than forty commercial initiatives. And what ease she displays! As if she had been doing it all her life.

Romeo Castellucci is interested in the construction of the image and its manipulation with a strong aesthetic and often political component. An imaginary where the most theatrical fits, as we have seen in Bros (Temporada Alta) and the trilogy on the Divine Comedy by Dante and On the Concept of Face, in the Son of God (Festival Grec), but also in performative installations such as Il terzo Reich (Temporada Alta) or this Believing in Masks. The Italian artist creates a sequence of objects that enter and leave the pristine white space of the museum-like air of the Raval room of the CCCB, surrounded by spectators masked with different human masks. They are objects of a certain quotidian nature (a glass of milk, a bouquet of flowers, a jug, a photograph of Stan Laurel, a crucifix...) which he names with names that have nothing to do with them, exhibiting an impossible logic, since the series is designed for the final appearance of an electric chair like those used in the executions of condemned to death and which, now yes, is called by its name: chair. A chair very similar to Andy Warhol's famous screen print that may or may not provoke the reaction of the attendees. From mere observation to its use and finally its figurative destruction. Forty minutes of a visual poem very typical of contemporary art.

Florentina Holzinger is one of the most daring voices in European theatre with proposals that, given what we've seen in this Ophelia’s got talent, show influences of the radical theatre of La Fura dels Baus from a few years ago and parallels with the work of Angélica Liddell or the Brazilian Carolina Bianchi. But, in my opinion, they evoke, due to their content and dramaturgy, or rather their absence, the so-called American vaudeville theatre of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conveniently updated. A very popular entertainment in which, one after another, musical numbers, dance, acrobatics, fakirism, illusionism, humour, with audience participation, and even biological oddities introduced by a presenter are presented. These kinds of shows were adapted for television after the Second World War.

The strategy of using a well-known title as a hook in proposals centered around popular works is legitimate, but in the case of this A Midsummer Night's Dream I believe it is, above all, an act of honesty and recognition that Àlex Rigola's dramaturgy is indebted to Shakespeare's genius and Salvador Oliva's excellent translation, even though very little remains of both. Little, but fundamental. Because what Rigola has imagined is a dynamic, jovial, daring, and at the same time, very delicate performance about love, one of the themes – perhaps the main one – of the great bard's fairy comedy.

The Dawn focuses on the search for origins through memory: a journey of discovery from the Spanish Civil War to the Barcelona Olympic Games that mirrors itself unashamedly in Wajdi Mouawad's great epic, Incendis (against the backdrop of the endless wars in Lebanon) which Oriol Broggi directed at the Romea theatre fourteen years ago and which, as a curiosity, was advertised with exactly the same duration of The Dawn by Jaume Viñas; three hours and forty minutes, which finally reach almost four hours.

Mario Gas is an actor, a theatre and opera director, but also a zarzuela director (in January he will restage Los gavilanes at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid), a genre of musical theatre for which he has great affection and passion. This is not surprising if we consider that Mario Gas was born in Montevideo during the tour (of more than a year!) of his parents' company through Latin America. Hence the title of the show La nit és blanca, muy blanca..., which he premiered at La Fàbrica with the fragment of the romance Despierta negro from La tabernera del puerto by Maestro Sorozábal, which his father sang when he was born. A declaration of intent, moreover, playing with Catalan and Spanish in a show that looks back without nostalgia, evoking those poetic voices that have been part of his life.

I don't know if Jordi Oriol, one of the most original creators of Catalan theatre, knows the work of the linguist and semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure, but his theatre in general and in particular L'últim àtom make me think so, because he uses linguistic games that alter the meaning of signs and words, illustrating the principle of linearity of the signifier and achieving surprising and humorous results. This is evident, for example, in the pronunciation (the speech) of the title of the show if we connect the two words or, more naively, if we consider the presumed and unknown actress Lara Segur, with phonetics that recall the name and surname of another well-known actress, who will not appear on stage and will be replaced by a supposed director: the actor Rubèn Ametllé. There is much more on the old green blackboard of the language teacher Mia Esteve, who plays with signifiers and signifieds and who replicates the mathematical formulas of professor Joan Carreras on another blackboard, where, talking about quantum physics and Schrödinger's cat, she posits the principle of observation as an international virus that threatens humanity. The professor and teacher are separated parents of a daughter who disappeared ten years ago, whose anniversary is approaching. She is joined by a Spanish-speaking army general, a priest, a mother in a wheelchair, a police inspector, the mother's lover, a theatre student, and a president who doesn't arrive... characters who inhabit a well-posed story but not so well resolved in the construction of a dramaturgy that is a victim of the same flexible and intuitive structure with which it is presented to us.

Carme Riera won the Sant Jordi prize (2003) with La meitat de l'ànima, an intrigue novel for which Ramon Simó and Magda Puyo have created a very fluid stage version, overcoming the difficulties inherent in a highly literary story, linked to the anti-Francoism of the fifties and sixties and anchored in public figures such as writers Albert Camus and Jorge Semprún, the anarchist and maquis Quico Sabaté, and the leader of the Lliga and former minister of Alfonso XIII Josep Bertran Musitu, who are only references for generations who already comb white hair.

The bottles of Fanta lemon on the tables at the usual refreshment offered by the Lliure after premieres were very suitable for this school-like proposal well conducted by an empathetic Olga Onrubia, chorus leader and guide of an entertaining look at Sophocles' classic but lacking the necessary pathos. It is a proposal that Andrea Jiménez's direction has populated with occurrences with little dramatic justification, such as replacing the old blind Tiresias with a girl heir to his power of prediction, reducing the character of Eurydice to nothing, or treating an Ismene dressed by her worst enemy as an actress who doesn't know what play she's in.

If wise is a person with deep and extensive knowledge about the topics they speak or write about, there is no doubt that Xavier Albertí is a wise man of theater and music. Who was director of the Grec Festival (1996-1999) and the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (2013-2021), colleague of Lluïsa Cunillé in the company La Reina de la Nit and director of small theater gems on texts by Harold Pinter, Thomas Bernhard, Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, until now had only flirted with acting, almost always in front of a piano, or cross-dressed as the Polish director Wanda Pitrowska for the premiere of L’aplec del Remei, by Josep Anselm Clavé in 2016 at the TNC, but had never achieved such prominence as in this Beethoven with a clear enough title.

It is very unusual for the great Greek classics to appear on the Barcelona theatre scene (the last one, I think, was Èdip directed by Oriol Broggi at the Romea with Julio Manrique in the lead role in 2018).'Èdip directed by Oriol Broggi at the Romea with Julio Manrique in the lead role in 2018). Hence the expectation surrounding Carlota Subirós's proposal, which brings together the three tragedies of Sophocles in a single performance in the natural order of events and not of writing, since Èdip a Colonos, the least performed worldwide, is the last but fits perfectly between the two most frequently staged: Èdip rei and Antígona. It fits but its lesser interest and lack of theatricality compared to the magnificent impact of the other two is clear.

An inevitable reminder of a rather significant performance in the history of the Teatre Lliure and a proposal for the future with a young company. The Night of the Tribades (that is, lesbians) premiered in 1978 under the direction of Fabià Puigserver and with Anna Lizaran, Quim Lecina, Domènec Reixach and Muntsa Alcañiz, who attended the premiere of the new proposal at the romantic Teatre de Sarrià and who at the end of the performance received a flower from the director, Oriol Broggi