Theatre review: Life is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño)

Cheek by Jowl make a welcome return to touring and to the Barbican, and add yet another international company to the ever-growing collection - in fairness the Russian ensemble probably aren't feeling welcome in too many places at the moment. Instead we have the first Spanish-language show from the company, and a Spanish Golden Age classic in Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream. We're in Poland (you can tell it's authentically Poland from the way all the characters have Spanish names,) for a kind of aggressively evil fairytale crossed with The Man in the Iron Mask: King Basilio's (Ernesto Arias) wife died in childbirth; rather than put that down to a tragic but common occurence in the 17th century, he labeled the baby a murderer, and consulting his horoscopes decided that his son Segismundo was going to grow up angry, violent and unpredictable.

To prevent someone so unsuitable succeeding him as king, he had the baby imprisoned in a remote tower, where he was raised in chains with no knowledge of who he was. Years later, Basilio decides to test whether his son really was fated to be a killer: The now-adult Segismundo (Alfredo Noval) wakes up in a palace and, after a lifetime of being treated as an animal and kept away from society, is told he has ultimate power. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Noval sets the tone for Declan Donnellan's production with a charismatic performance: Segismundo, who sometimes barks like a dog, is also dog-like in personality; he can be dangerously unpredictable, like when he settles a bet with a guard (Antonio Prieto) by throwing him off a balcony, but he also has a puppy-like enthusiasm for his new circumstances, mostly demonstrated by his many journeys out into the stalls to interact with the audience, the rest of the cast having to drag him back to the stage. These scenes have an underlying feel of Greek tragedy despite their lightness of touch - this is essentially a story of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the prince is unlikely to have become the dangerous man he was prophesied to be, if he hadn't been raised in chains.

The title comes from Basilio's plan for dealing with his experiment: When Segismundo wakes up as a prince, he's told he only dreamed his imprisonment. When he inevitably fails the test and is returned, drugged again, to his cell, it's now the days as a prince that were the dream, essentially adding psychological torture to the list of crimes against him. Cheek by Jowl's frantic and unpredictable style is dialled up to 11 to mirror some of this discombobulating feeling in the production itself. So the essentially dark and bloody story sometimes breaks into incongruously comic moments.

These extend to the design - the main feature of Nick Ormerod's set is a green wall full of doors used with almost farcical energy. The prisoner is soothed by a radio playing a jaunty 1950s tune which causes the whole cast to break into increasingly grotesque dance. A subplot featuring Segismundo's cousins Estrella (Irene Serrano) and Astolfo (Manuel Moya) plus the latter's jilted lover Rosaura (Rebeca Matellán) is a bit of an awkward fit into the rest of the story, so Donnellan just accentuates that further by turning its central scene into a sitcom, complete with canned laughter.

Ganecha Gil's lighting design also feeds into the unpredictability by focusing the eye on parts of the theatre we wouldn't normally be looking at: Most of the play is lit traditionally, in the sense of the lighting being on the playing space on the stage's apron. But sometimes the house lights come up to show the characters they're being watched; at others the unused spaces of the vast Barbican stage behind the main action is the focus, highlighting the way the story exists in the middle of a completely different reality. It's all very clever and thematically on-point, but crucially as mad and entertaining as ever.

The show's opening is so frantic and confusing, (including Noval's briefFULL-FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!and Goizalde Núñez' tragic clown Clarin arriving on stage crying like a baby and emerging feet-first from a box,) I wondered if we'd found the show where Cheek by Jowl finally lost me. But the company still knows how to tell a story and once it got going the evening really sucked me into its contradictory, illusory world.

Life is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño) is booking until the 16th of April at the Barbican Theatre; then continuing on tour to Alicante, Budapest, Almada and Gijón.

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Javier Naval