Life Is A Dream

Just months before he died in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe posited in a poem “is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” Or are we, as the proponents of simulation theory suggest, living in a computer-generated world? Cheek By Jowl dig deep into this idea in their Spanish language revival of Life Is A Dream, a work which raises questions over the very nature of reality, free will and mortality and the merits of monarchy.

The play itself – like the philosophical concepts behind it - is not new. Spanish Golden Age playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s seminal work has been bewitching audiences since it debuted in 1639. The plot is one fit for an opera and focuses on King Basilio of Poland and his only son Segismundo. As a child, the latter was locked away in a tower in the mountains after it was prophesied that he would become a monstrous tyrant. In the present, Basilio considers releasing him on the proviso that, should things go pear-shaped, Segismundo will be drugged, returned to his prison and told that his escape was nothing but a dream. What could go wrong?

As Basilio, King of Poland, Ernesto Arias is a commanding figure battling between his desire to see his son and to avoid what he has been told will be a disaster for himself and his country. Nick Ormerod’s set design consists mostly of multiple doorways in a row; through them, the cast burst out and slink away or we catch occasional glimpses of strange imagery, not least the naked form of Alfred Noval’s Segismundo.

While Arias ominously watches from the back or dramatically clutches his metaphorical pearls in long speeches imploring us to understand his difficult dilemma, it is Noval who adds the real dynamism here. Segismundo’s unexpected release leads him to question from the off whether he is awake or asleep and Noval wonderfully encapsulates his confusion. His quite understandable denial of the events after his arrival at court lead him to perform acts both amusing (moving along the aisle touching the audience members as he goes) and horrific (throwing one servant off an imagined balcony).

Director Declan Donnellan’s approach to this classic is relatively faithful but shows little imagination when it comes to dealing with the more stultifying and tedious part of the play. Oklahoma!, Cabaret and Age of Rage all showed what can be done by taking the original concepts and giving them innovative staging and this work cries out for something more captivating and memorable to bring to life a host of fascinating ideas which permeate through to modern life.