Abstract

The relationship between place and stage, and between landscape and theatre, can be enormously revealing in terms of a playwright’s sense of self, identity, and culture. During the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, a paradoxical phenomenon occurred whereby the city of Barcelona —or Catalunya, for that matter— as an image, notion, rhetorical figure, or poetic trope seemed to have all but vanished from the contemporary Catalan stage (specifically, from the realm of text-based drama). In the new millennium, however, Barcelona is gradually becoming visible on the stage once again. The three contemporary playwrights examined here —Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, Llüisa Cunillé, and Sergi Belbel— have all displayed an awareness of the aesthetic and political implications of a dialectic of visibility and invisibility, appearance and disappearance.