Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

Urban legend claims that Cava sold out in Catalonia on November 20, 1975, the day General Francisco Franco died. Theatre practitioners saw the dictator’s demise as a call to arms, with 1976 marking the birth of two institutions that continue to play a key role in Barcelona’s dramatic landscape: the Teatre Lliure [Free Theatre] and the Grec Theatre Festival. Critics, practitioners, and journalists from the era were alive to the political significance of the festival and theatre more generally. Even the nomenclature—Grec is Catalan for Greek—was far from incidental. Named after one of the venues, the Greek-style auditorium built on the Montjuic-wooded hill for the 1929 Universal Exhibition and neglected under Franco, it also evoked the close relationship between Athenian democracy and theatre. While not, as is often claimed, banning works in Catalan across the board, the government in Madrid and major theatre impresarios relegated them to the status of provincial curiosities. Featuring plays as well as concerts in both Castilian Spanish and Catalan, the inaugural Grec Festival favored works that had previously been prohibited or at least faced obstacles. Attended by nearly 30,000 spectators, resistance against institutional and linguistic colonialism exercised by the centralized state can retrospectively be seen as a key step towards Barcelona establishing itself in democracy as the theatrical capital of not only Catalonia but also Spain.