Life is a Dream - This is London

Written in 1635, Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s philosophical allegory has echoes of both Oedipus and The Tempest with its dehumanised central character incarcerated in an attempt to thwart a

harmful prophecy. In the belief that his son would prove a cruel monarch, Basilio, King of Poland pronounced his baby son dead and secretly locked him away with only masked guards and the nobleman Clotaldo for company.

Hardly surprising then, that (despite his royal birth) a confused Segismundo acts as much like a beast as a man when the disguised lady Rosaura inadvertently stumbles across his prison tower, or that, briefly returned to court so that the king can judge his true nature, his behaviour is hardly regal. Drugged so that he can be duped into believing that his experience of freedom is just a dream, Dominic West’s cropheaded, atavistic Segismundo lashes out, forcing his father to lock him up again until external forces compel him to give his son another chance.

With its themes of conflict between free will and destiny, fantasy and reality, and incompatible loyalties to kin and country, this is a sometimes verbose and awkwardly structured drama. But Jonathan Munby’s well-acted production (in a new version by Helen Edmundson and played out against the ragged gold leaf map of Angela Davies’ stark design) successfully embraces the subplot of Kate Fleetwood’s cross dressed, revenge-seeking Rosaura.

West (of The Wire fame) proves a powerfully angry stage presence as he tries to make sense of his life-long imprisonment and his short-lived liberty, whilst Lloyd Hutchinson’s droll Clarion adds a welcome note of perfectly timed comedy to this complex play from the Spanish Golden Age.

Donmar