Ibiza’s new hot ticket: dinner and a show at a 19th-century theatre

The season has started in Ibiza and anti-tourism protests are hotting up. A week before my arrival, a thousand locals took to the streets of the party island’s capital Ibiza Town with placards bearing slogans such as “Tourism, yes but not like this”. The 3mn tourists who visit each year are blamed for overloaded infrastructure and high living costs. In nearby Mallorca, activists have called for beaches to be occupied by protestors this summer. 

Happily for me, my dip in the Mediterranean at the Playa d’en Bossa, Ibiza’s longest beach, passes without incident. I am not hauled from the water kicking and thrashing like a giant invasive species of fish. Then comes a pleasant 30-minute stroll into Ibiza Town, past hotel resorts, seafront restaurants and bars. They are the signs of Ibiza’s near total economic reliance on tourism. The island cannot live with its millions of visitors, according to angry residents. But what would it be without them?

An attempt to square that circle awaits me at my destination, the handsomely restored Teatro Pereyra, a 19th-century theatre that shut in 1987 but has just reopened. Its inaugural performance is an immersive dinner-and-show combination — a concept that seems a world away from the all-night superclubs and foam parties which made the island famous. But the reactivated theatre is also intended to foster local pride. A strikingly beautiful performance space with a maximum capacity of almost 500, it will show films, plays and concerts in the off-season for Ibizans. There are no other venues like it on the island.

“It’s a business mixed with some social responsibility,” Pedro Matutes Barceló tells me. The 56-year-old is chief executive of Sirenis Hotels and Resorts, the firm that owns the theatre. It is a family company linked to Ibiza’s most powerful dynasty: the Matutes clan is to the White Isle as the Kennedys are to Boston, in the description of Spanish newspaper El Mundo. Their companies control a substantial portion of the island’s tourist industry, from clubs such as Ushuaïa to package-deal resorts.

Teatro Pereyra was co-founded by Abel Matutes, Pedro’s great-grandfather, a banker. Opening in 1899, it was built in an elegant neo-classical style at what was then the edge of Ibiza Town. The island’s heraldic shield, showing seven fortified towers, is embossed on the pink-painted facade below the portico. Ibiza Town’s vast sandstone city wall is next to the building. On the idyllically warm evening that I visit, starlings chirrup from trees on the opposite side of the street while people stand chatting with drinks on a balcony above the entrance.

The theatre’s restoration has taken 16 years. It was delayed by the discovery of a Roman site underneath the building, which is still being excavated by archaeologists. According to Matutes, it has cost about €17mn, all funded privately. “This is not just another venue in Ibiza. This is Teatro Pereyra, which is very special for Ibizans,” he says.

At the front of the building is a bar, which doubles as a live music venue, with a stage at one end of the rectangular room and an antique piano from the original 1899 building at the other. The 1980s synthpop of Depeche Mode’s “New Life” is playing on the sound system as we enter. Then we step through a solid pair of internal doors, and, wow — I find myself in a fabulously ornate pocket palace of a theatre: horseshoe-shaped, all gilt and deep red, warmly lit, with boxes lining each side. New life, indeed.

In its old life, 125 years ago, the theatre opened with the staging of a controversial tragedy about an unmarried working-class couple, Joaquín Dicenta’s Juan José. “Some of the ladies were shocked,” Matutes says; a number of them walked out. Over subsequent decades, the theatre was used for concerts, operas, circus shows and as a dancehall. It was operating as a cinema when it shut down in 1987. The bar at the front, however, remained open until 2018.

Among its regular clientele was one of Spain’s best-known pop musicians, who is now involved in Teatro Pereyra’s relaunch as artistic director. Nacho Cano, 61, was in the band Mecano, a trio who were synthpop contemporaries of Depeche Mode and massive in the Spanish-speaking world in the 1980s and 1990s. Cano first performed in Ibiza in 1982. “It was fantastic. There were like 300 people by a swimming pool, and the girls were swimming nude,” he tells me. He thought to himself: “I want to be here.”

He initially bought a flat in Ibiza Town, and now has a house in the north of the island. Café Pereyra, the bar attached to the then shuttered theatre, was a regular haunt, a bohemian joint for jamming and rubbing shoulders with visiting stars such as Mick Jagger and Robert Plant. “I’d come to have a beer and there’d be Prince playing and then I’d go play with him,” he says.

Cano has devised a dinner show for the newly reopened theatre that celebrates the island’s counter-cultural history. Ibiza Hippie Heaven is a cheerful jukebox musical about a pair of American hippies fleeing the Vietnam war draft for the paradisal White Isle in the early 1970s. The story jaunts around Ibiza’s development as a tourist mecca, including the arrival of the jet set in the 1970s and clubbing in the 1980s. The dialogue is in English, with Spanish subtitles on a high-tech background screen. Lots of famous songs from different eras are sung by the actors, a karaoke-style array of “We Will Rock You”, “Uptown Funk” and “Every Breath You Take”, accompanied by a live band and dancers. 

The performance is watched by diners seated at tables arranged around the floor and in the boxes. The food is a lux affair involving dishes with sea urchin cream and boletus foam, minimally sized and maximally tasty, like a yacht-rock remix of El Bulli.

Tickets are not cheap. Standing room up in the gods — known in Spanish as paraíso, or paradise — costs €50 (“including a free drink,” Matutes adds). A seat at a table is €250, which covers dinner and drinks. Audience interaction is encouraged. By the end of the show, everybody is on their feet jiggling about to a DJ and the theatre then turns into a disco until the early hours.

The outraged ladies who walked out in 1899 would not know where to look. But they would surely recognise the sumptuousness of the setting. Ibiza’s first theatre is back in business.

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