In its struggle to stay afloat in the face of a crippling tax on culture, a Madrid theatre company has decided to reorient itself towards a more tax-friendly industry: pornography.

The theatre group Primas de Riesgo, or Risk Premium, was set up two years ago during the depths of the country’s economic crisis, and its name is a nod to the mood of the times.

“The risk premium was all anyone was talking about,” the group’s 33-year-old director, Karina Garantivá, said.

Austerity was another word on everyone’s lips, and cited by the rightwing People’s party as it slashed subsidies for the culture sector and hiked the tax on ticket sales for theatres and cinemas from 8% to 21%.

Initially the group decided to swallow the tax rise. “When people are struggling to meet their basic needs, you can’t talk about raising the ticket prices,” Garantivá said.

That was before they realised that magazines, from gossip rags to porn, continued to benefit from a reduced tax rate.

“It’s scandalous when cultural heritage is being taxed at 21% and porn at only at 4%. Something is wrong,” Garantivá said.

From there began a very public campaign to convert Primas de Riesgo into a distributor of pornographic magazines, partly to save on taxes but also to “start a discussion about this paradox”.

For the past month, the group has sold back issues of the magazine Gente Libre, or Free People, for €16 (£12.70) each.

The magazines, which date back to the 80s and 90s, were secured through an agreement with a collector, and with each copy comes a free ticket to the group’s production of El Mágico Prodigioso, a 17th-century drama by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, whom Garantivá describes as Spain’s Shakespeare.

Their porn partnership resulted in 180 tickets being given away for the show’s premiere, held this week.

Primas de Riesgo isn’t the first theatre group in Spain to swap its tickets for a more tax-friendly product. Last year a Catalan company sold carrots, taxed at 4%, for €13 each, with a free ticket for its performances thrown in.

Pointing to diminishing audiences, falling revenue and heavy job losses, leading cultural figures in Spain have urged the government to reverse the tax hike.

In an article published last year, Pedro Almodóvar took aim at the country’s finance minister, Cristóbal Montoro, pointing out that the VAT on cultural industries in France, Italy and Germany was half or less of that of Spain.

In February, Montoro told Spanish media the government was working on a plan to lower the cultural tax. “But we need to be left alone so we can work. We’re taking it step by step,” he said.