These Catalan plays can perhaps best be seen in contrast to the British tradition of 'state of the nation' and 'in yer face' playwrighting. The plays are somewhat enigmatic and even elliptical. They represent elements of a more 'European' less 'UK' playwrighting style with echoes of early Pinter, maybe David Mercer. There is just a hint of Mark Ravenhill/Sarah Kane but any potential violence is purely implied.The Sales Complete is an apparently non-political work concerned with three characters involved in the selling and buying of an apartment - solitary souls who are lost in the desert of the modern world, seeking an arm to cling on to so that they may be saved. It has a social context but this is subservient to the characters' stilted emotional interaction. A collision between the personal and the political; a past affair that might just rekindle and present corruption in 'the party'. Can he persuade her not to cause trouble for the party leadership or will she ignore the feelings she still has for him to bring the leadership down? "Black Beach" is more naturalistic but even here we are not really told exactly what the politics of 'the party' is.

Exploring a boy's childhood in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship, "Under the Dust" is based on the autobiographical experience of prize-winning Catalan author Jordi Coca. In period and location - an oppressive late 1940s and early 50s when the dictatorship's repression was strongly felt at all levels of people's everyday lives - the novel echoes the recent bestseller "The Shadow of the Wind". But the affecting closeness of the boy's first-person narrative and its pitiless realism set this book apart. The boy's bewildered responses to his father's violence and authoritarianism are played out at home and in a neighbourhood dominated by street gangs, where politics is never more than a block away. This novel was awarded the Sant Jordi prize in 2000. "A tough implacable novel that makes no concessions...its ending has a rawness to chill the spirit of the hardiest reader." - Avui.