It is easy to imagine the surprise of the playwright and director Lucía Carballal (Les Bàrbares, Los nuestros) when the National Classical Theatre Company (CNTC) commissioned her to write a text that would dialogue with the little-known work of Calderón de la Barca El Castillo de Lindabridis. It is a fantastic comedy in which a princess travels with a flying castle in search of a husband who will make her queen after her father's death. We must celebrate Carballal's talent and skill in this powerful and brilliant exercise of autofiction that speaks of helplessness and of inheritance, both emotional and physical, both material and immaterial.

South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, with 29.1 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, according to 2025 data. South Korean director Jinyeob Lee wanted to bring this issue to the stage and decided to do so by drawing inspiration from one of the country's most deeply rooted traditional practices: that of the female divers of Jeju Island, who practice free-diving to collect seafood. Starting from the diving technique, Lee devised the show "Muljil", which she has performed with the company Elephants Laugh and which will be shown this Wednesday and Thursday at the Teatre Lliure, as part of the Grec festival. The play places four cubicles filled with water on stage. In each, an performer is submerged with the water up to their nose.

Although Barcelona broke its heat record this Wednesday and the Teatre Grec stage is outdoors, Argentine actor Joaquín Furriel (Lomas de Zamora, 1974) is not afraid of the city's high temperatures. "I premiered my first play when I was 13, on December 20th in Buenos Aires, which is like performing here in July. I'm always happy when I perform in the heat, it's a caress for my soul," the performer highlights. He is the protagonist of The True Story of Richard III, a show directed by Calixto Bieito that will be performed this Friday and Saturday as part of the Grec festival. The play arrives in Barcelona after being staged in Madrid and Bilbao and having a season and national tour in Argentina with a very enviable reception: for two and a half months, the show could be seen from Wednesday to Sunday at the Teatro San Martín, which has a capacity of 950 people. They sold out all tickets.

The Grec festival annually seeks out the most in-vogue creators on the international scene to bring them to Barcelona and thus become a showcase for the most celebrated shows worldwide. In this year's edition, one of these names is that of South African artist Ntando Cele (Durban, 1980), who has landed in the Catalan capital with two proposals in her suitcase: Wasted land (which is being performed at the Teatre Lliure this Friday and Saturday) and SPAfrica (which will be seen this Tuesday and Wednesday at the Centre de les Arts Lliures).

The title of the new proposal by Oriol Puig Grau, author of the celebrated Karaoke Elusia, I told the mystery behind the tarot cards. Specifically, this mystery refers to the Tower card, which is generally interpreted as divine wrath announcing catastrophe, chaos, and ruin. However, it can also have a positive meaning: to stir the person to get them out of their comfort zone and confront them with the world. The sixteenth number of the major arcana rises from the first interpretation. Oriol Puig Grau's work poses a kind of journalistic investigation into the history of an isolated house, struck by lightning. In the building, located on the outskirts of a town, youth used to raves, and it was inhabited by a mysterious Russian woman.

The Mexican playwright, director, and actor Anacarsis Ramos (Campeche, 1996) has been working since he can remember. Born into a family of salespeople, during his childhood and adolescence he saw dozens of businesses come and go from his home without any of them truly taking root. His mother, Josefina Orlaineta, has had more than 40 different jobs – most of which involved using the house as a warehouse or workshop – and all of this made household economics an inseparable element of his daily life. With all this experience, Ramos has built a show that he has titled "My mother and the money, and which gives the mother a new job: that of interpreter. The show has been to Belgium, Greece, Canada and Germany, and will now be seen at the Espai Lliure on Tuesday 7 and Wednesday 8 July, as part of the Grec Festival.

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.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill conceived The Threepenny Opera in a specific context, Victorian London, and in a determined physical space, the underbelly of Soho, inhabited by traitors, murderers, prostitutes, and exploiters. The versions we have known among us — Mario Gas's, premiered at the Romea Theatre in 1984, and Calixto Bieito's, premiered precisely at the Grec Festival in 2002 — varied the context but maintained the physical space. Above all, they maintained the characteristics that define the characters (from stage presence to costume) and the brutality of the capitalist society they describe and satirize.

Perhaps because it's our anniversary, the Teatre Grec Gardens are buzzing with people and activity, even though it's just past seven in the evening. It's one of the summer's big events and everyone wants to enjoy it and talk about it. The heat doesn't make it easy (shadows are highly sought after, hats and fans, at full speed), but the collective enthusiasm overcomes everything. The ducks quack contentedly – and will do so even more during the night – from the pond that welcomes one of Barcelona's most emblematic spaces. "At least they're in the water," says a woman to the man accompanying her, who follows her carrying two glasses full to the brim.

From June 29 to August 2, the Grec festival will present an eclectic and unique program across Barcelona, featuring theater, dance, music, circus, and performances. The city's most important performing arts festival, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary, will be inaugurated with The Threepenny Operadirected by Marta Pazos and will feature almost a hundred shows. Of all of them, we have made a selection with the most notable.

50 years ago, a group of artists joined forces with one goal: to reclaim the Grec Theatre and put it at the service of the people. From that collective impulse, the Grec was born, a festival that in the last five decades has become a showcase for the best international shows and, at the same time, a springboard for local creation. We take advantage of the anniversary to rescue the festival's behind-the-scenes history from the hands of artists and directors who have been part of it all this time.

Ten years ago, a jolt impacted the family of playwright, director, and actor Jaume Viñas (Barcelona, 1987). Following that shake-up, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins began to hold a series of family lunches and dinners where, all of a sudden, everyone opened up about things that had previously been kept in the shadows. "My sister and I realized that our two grandmothers had suffered a lot," explains Viñas. That experience sowed the seed for L'albada, the playwright's most ambitious production, which will be performed from June 25 to July 30 at the Biblioteca de Catalunya under the direction of Oriol Broggi and as part of the Grec festival. With around forty characters, the production spans three generations and is a grand family story that delves into the silences, memory, and legacy derived from the Civil War. Viñas prefers not to explain the nature of the family jolt so as not to reveal the play's ending.

Leticia Martín (Granada, 1978) was appointed two years ago new director of the Grec, Barcelona's most important performing arts festival. This year's edition – the 50th – is the first that she has programmed from scratch and allows us to see the artistic line the festival will follow. Martín is working to expand the Grec and make it reach Barcelona residents who are still unaware of it, while also wanting the festival to be a window into the contemporary scene of the present and a support for local creation. Why did you run for director of the Grec?

Two years ago, director Ferran Utzet and actress Emma Vilarasau were looking for allies and producers to stage an ambitious project: to bring to the stage La truita by the Frenchman Baptiste Amann, a family tragicomedy that required eight performers on stage. Finally, they found the company Bitò, the Teatre Poliorama, and the Grec Festival as accomplices, and the production is about to become a reality. La truita will be performed from June 27 to August 8 at Poliorama within the Grec and will then inaugurate this same theater, where it will have a run from September 8 to October 18, with plans to tour Catalonia in 2027. "It is a great spectacle that requires a team of phenomenal actors. We wanted to do it on a grand scale, it is demanding in terms of casting and also the scenic device," states Utzet. For the production, he has used a translation by Carles Batlle, who is the one who discovered the play to him.

A hundred shows in 58 venues in Barcelona will make up the program for the 50th Grec Festival, which will take place from June 29 to July 31. This year, the most important performing arts event in the Catalan capital is celebrating, and for this reason its director, Leticia Martín, has devised a program thinking about "how to make the present serve to read the past and imagine the future". The 2026 Grec "will not make the past a monument, but a tool" and will have "Montjuïc at its heart but will extend throughout the city", says Martín, who has promoted the creation of a festival archive to gather all the material from this half-century of life.

It's rare that the press area at the Teatre Lliure is so crowded the company presenting the show that it's practically bursting at the seams. This Monday was no exception, but the overcrowding was justified: the Grec Festival and the Teatre Lliure are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2026, and to mark the occasion, they've decided to pull out all the stops with a massive production. The Three-Royal Opera by Bertolt Brecht. It will be directed by the Galician creator Marta Pazos, responsible for shows that have left their mark on Barcelona, ​​such as the opera Alexina B and the García Lorca montage The public. Dani Espasa will assume the musical direction of the show, which will feature a live orchestra, choreography by Mabel Olea, and 12 performers on stage, including top names such as Nao Albet, Eduard Farelo, Míriam Moukhles, Júlia Truyol, and Roc Bernad. "It will be a celebration born from pleasure, joy, and hope," says Julio Manrique, director of the Lliure. Letícia Martín, director of the Grec Festival, adds that "a show of this scale was perfect for both openings: the festival itself, on June 29, and the Lliure's season."

"Now, finally, we'll be able to see it in Barcelona," celebrates Leticia Martín, director of the Grec Festival in Barcelona. She's referring to Forever, a masked production directed by Iñaki Rikarte and produced by Kulunka Teatre, the National Drama Center, the Arriaga Theater in Bilbao, and the Victoria Eugenia Theater in San Sebastian. The play, which won the Best Direction and Best Author awards at the 2024 Max Awards, will run for five performances from July 23 to 27 at the Teatre Condal in Barcelona. "We have to seize this opportunity," says Daniel Anglès, the theater's artistic director.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona It is thought to be a comedy about Shakespeare's youth, and, as usual, it is not known exactly when it premiered. What is clear to biographers such as Peter Ackroyd is that it is a work written at breakneck speed, with the resulting inconsistencies, inspired, as is usual with Shakespeare, by other preceding writings and ultimately with the satirical air of the romantic drama of the 16th century. And hence the unexpected ending, which seems to mock those works, since when it comes to choosing between love and friendship, Shakespeare opts for the friendly relationship between Proteus and Valentine, leaving Julia and Silvia, the two young women of marriageable age, in Decla's magnificent proposal, with a pinch of salt. In other words, a friendship forged over years of adventures and secrets cannot be equated with falling in love, no matter how beautiful the girl may be.

The director of this contemporary look at Bertolt Brecht's classic Mother Courage, Lisaboa Houbrechts, arrives at the Greek Theatre preceded by a certain fame for having grown up in the kitchen of Jan Lauwers' Neecompany and worked alongside Alain Platel and Ivo Van Hove, all of them protagonists of the best Belgian theatre. Also for her other contemporary views on Medea in the Comedie Francaise or on Orpheus and Eurydice directed to Hanover. In those shows he mixes - I want to believe successfully - visual arts, music, text, choreography and performance.

It's rare that three big names on the international scene coincide in Barcelona with their most cutting-edge shows. The Grec Festival has made it happen by programming this weekend productions by two great figures in contemporary dance, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Christos Papadopoulos, and one of the most unique voices in contemporary theater, Carolina Bianchi. The first two arrive to sold-out venues, and in Bianchi's case, she's about to sell out.