Summer in Barcelona means Grec

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Among Barcelona's theater people, summer doesn't begin until they go up to the Teatre Grec to see a show. Whether it's at the festival's inauguration, which gathers the cream of the invitation-extracting class, or at some of the many concerts or recitals held every July, the summer starting gun for our culture vultures is not the Estrella advertisement, but the first beer—very expensive, prohibitive—in these Montjuïc gardens. To get there, you'll climb the stairs from Passeig de la Santa Madrona, sniffing the scent of cut grass and jasmine, and once in the rose garden, you'll take the typical selfie with the city in the background, because, as with Caesar's wife, the modern hipster must not only be one, but also appear to be one and spread it to the four winds. What does it matter that the garden is also open the rest of the year: for eleven months, this spot will only be inhabited by runners and neighbors walking their dogs, and the following summer, the stands will once again be filled with hipsters and songs to the muses.

They say that the construction of the Teatre Grec was the work of the French landscape architect Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, who, while strolling through Montjuïc as it was being landscaped for the great International Exhibition, noticed the rocky hole, like a cave, left by the Machinet quarry. "This would be an ideal place to build a theater," he apparently said, and no sooner said than done: after some trips to Greece to take measurements, in 1929 the largest open-air amphitheater in Catalonia was inaugurated with a poetic recital by a woman, Josefina Tàpies. Continuing with female voices, in 1932 the Grec hosted the Electra by the great Margarida Xirgu, and in 1960, after the war, a 21-year-old Nuria Espert performed there the most controversial Hamlet in our history: the shouts from the stalls about the blasphemy of seeing her play a man covered her first verses, but she continued with the performance until a "to be or not to be" of justice.

Also noteworthy was the first edition of the Festival Grec—we're already at 42!—which in 1976 started self-managed by the Assemblea d'Actors i Directors, and with the brave determination to perform texts prohibited during the dictatorship. On opening night, inspectors from "la social" showed up and several people in charge spent the night in the police station, and by August, newspapers were full of indignant letters to the editor, denouncing that "for two months we have had to endure singers of a clear separatist hue" and shows that "tried to undermine the foundations of religion and the unity of the peoples of Spain."

Today el Grec is a consolidated festival: mayors of all colors have passed through, we have seen Romeo Castellucci's mountaineer actors climb up the quarry, to the sky, and some performances that extended beyond the pit, like that historic Peer Gynt by Calixto Bieito and Joel Joan where the show continued in the gardens during intermission. In fact, once at the Grec, earthly problems are of no importance: it doesn't matter if the kid failed all his classes or if the air conditioning broke at work. Once you sit in the semicircular stands and the lights go out, it's you and two thousand expectant people, holding your breath, and ready for the first actor to come out on stage and the magic of theater to begin again.