The theater director Àlex Rigola does not conceive of summer readings as light readings. "Light literature just doesn't get to me. Books like The Girl on the Train seem unbearable to me, very hard to read, because there are only actions," he explains. What seduces him is more the "how it is told" than the "what." That is, the style, the voice, in short, high-flying literature. "I look for art in the narrative of writing more than in cinema. Sometimes emotional cinema takes me away, and on the other hand, in literature, I need the text itself to have quality," says the director of the Heartbreak Hotel theater.

Àlex Rigola wanted to recover the magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream which he premiered in a macro-production in Düsseldorf in 2014. The idea was to place a production with a large cast in a small room like the Heartbreak Hotel theatre. "When I think of Grec, I think of a festival, a party and, therefore, Grec should serve for special things to happen in the city's venues", argues Rigola, who was a candidate to direct the festival. With this maxim, he premieres a show that requires a special commitment from all participants, both interpretative and economic, because even filling the room doesn't make the numbers add up: twelve performers will perform throughout July on a stage for seventy seats (which are practically sold out).

Àlex Rigola returns to the Teatre Lliure, which he directed a few years ago (2003-2011), with an ambitious version of Mikhail Bulgakov's monumental work. The Master and MargaritaConsidered one of the most important works of 20th-century Russian literature, we first saw it theatrically in 2003 in a version directed by Xicu Masó that premiered at Lliure de Gràcia as part of the Grec Festival. Pep Tosar would do another very intimate one in 2013 at the small Círcol Maldà and In 2012, the sumptuous and spectacular production of Théâtre du Complicité would arrive by Simon McBurney that fully exploited all the visual possibilities of a novel with traits of the fantasy genre.

It had been eight years since Àlex Rigola had set foot in the main hall of the Teatre Lliure, since that Ivanov 2017, with which he announced that he had become a "stage diabetic" and wanted to bury his theatrical stamp and disappear behind the actors. After years locked in a wooden box and in a fifty-seat room (his theater, the Heartbreak Hotel), finally Rigola returns to do theatre for five hundred people with a resounding title, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail A. Bulgakov (1891-1949), which will be at the Montjuïc Theatre from September 18 to October 19. "Here we had to put on a show. The entire work is crazy. And the stage bet is for everything to be crazy," he warns.

The theatre season starts with good omens and two new features: a new theatre in the Farró neighbourhood, called La Fàbrica, and a festival exclusively of international proposals that serves the Temporada Alta in Barcelona, ​​baptized as Autumn Flash, which will be spread across different venues. As usual, the season kicks off with a recap of some of last year's achievements (The storm, Archimedes' principle, Grand Canyon, The housekeeper, Giant, etc.) and even years ago, like the mythical Christmas at Casa Cupiello (in November at the Library). But it also has a series of must-see premieres planned. We've selected 10 productions we won't want to miss this fall.