Breaking through the bar-room chatter, a voice calls audience members downstairs, to the basement of Madrid’s “Microtheater.”

Formerly a butcher’s shop, this theater bar in a formerly undesirable neighborhood of the Spanish capital now uses its tiny underground chambers for a novel form of budget entertainment.

Paying four euros (just over $5) each — a fraction of the cost of a typical theater ticket — audiences of about a dozen cram into a room a few yards square and sit close up to the actors or lean against the wall to watch a 15-minute show.

The Microtheater was launched three years ago, after the start of the five-year economic crisis which has hit spending hard, not least on pleasures such as the theater.

On a Saturday night, the 54 mini-shows performed back to back in the theater’s five rooms often sell-out, says the company’s manager, Veronica Larios, 35.

“A lot of people are unemployed, a lot of people have had their salaries cut, so people have less spending power in general now in Spain,” she says.

“This is a form that lets you spend time in the theater, and spend just as much as you want to.”

On a recent autumn evening, punters could choose between shows as diverse as a comedy set in a 1960s Spanish kitchen, or a drama set in a torture chamber.

“It is a very intense experience,” said one member of the audience, Belen Garcia, a 36-year-old economist, on her first ever visit to the Microtheater.

“You see the actors right in front of you. If you stretched out your arm you could almost touch them.”

In the Bohemian district of La Latina, this venue houses audiences of 25 for shows running an hour or more for up to 20 euros a time.

The novelty here is that the plays are performed not in a regular theater but in an old ground-floor apartment — and that the audiences have kept coming.

Tonight its walls are decked out with hunting trophies and gilded mirrors, with thick red carpets and a small altar to the Virgin Mary: Props for a production of Anton Chekhov’s “Ivanov,” a classic rarely staged in Spain.

Martret and the theater’s co-director Alberto Puraenvidia, a set-designer of 36, say they made a “kamikaze” gamble by pouring all their resources into mounting the show in March 2012, hoping it would run for at least three months.

“It was time to take a risk,” said Martret. “It is a difficult time for the theater. It is in permanent crisis.”

“Ivanov” ended up being more popular than they expected and ran for 287 performances before they switched to staging different shows, encouraged by its success.

La Casa de la Portera and the Microtheater do not bring in enough in ticket sales to provide a living for the actors and crew. But they see it as a bridge to other, potentially more lucrative projects.

At the Microtheater, the manager Larios says they have sold licences to venues in Argentina, Mexico and Miami to run Microtheater shows, and are negotiating to do the same in London.

These are a few small signs of life in the theater sector despite economic adversity.

Three years ago, a handful of theater professionals launched, without any public subsidies, a new theater festival, Russafa Escenica, with shows set in unusual locations.