In the quarter of a century since Belbel first began his playwriting career much has changed in Catalan theatre. He has formed part of these changes and helped in no small way to shape them. In his early career he was instrumental in restoring the primacy of the text in a Catalonia dominated by internationally renowned performance groups, yet always respecting the work of these groups. His 1980s plays were very different from the realist idiom favoured by the Franco generation of Catalan playwrights and helped forge a new minimalist style of Catalan writing that proved to be hugely influential. Although some of the plays he has written in the past decade conform, to a limited extent, to what Carles Batlle has identified as a new concentration on local issues in Catalan drama, as A la Toscana clearly demonstrates, this can in no way be considered to be a firm trend in his writing. Although a number of his plays tackle recognisably contemporary issues, such as the sexual and social outsider, the dysfunctional family and domestic and terrorist violence, it is difficult to detect specific local settings and they are rarely set in recognisable locations. La sang was inspired by an ETA kidnap and murder, but it is not a play about Basque terrorism, while Forasters is in no way a detailed study of the social phenomenon of immigration, despite the fact that Belbel is the son of Andalusian immigrants to industrial Catalonia. Socio-political issues are often linked to what one might term broader, more philosophical, questions surrounding life and death, and modes of thinking through the ethical and social decisions taken by the characters that inhabit the plays Belbel’s work is particularly concerned with the subjectivity of time and the irrationality of the human mind, while, on the other hand, his fascination with science reflects his interest in rational phenomena and in dissecting the composition of the material world. In contrast to the stage plays, Ventura Pons’s film versions of them are firmly set within Barcelona locations that enhance a sense of period and place. Their international projection in film festivals and retrospectives has indirectly enabled Belbel’s work to become accessible to a wider audience, and has arguably served to gain it new audiences in another medium.