Life Is a Dream

 (Donmar Warehouse, London; 250 seats; £29 $47 top)

By DAVID BENEDICT

Kate Fleetwood stars in the Donmar Warehouse’s 'Life Is a Dream,' from a new adaptation by Helen Edmundson of Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s play.

A Donmar Warehouse presentation of a play in two acts by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, in a new version by Helen Edmundson. Directed by Jonathan Munby.
 
Segismundo - Dominic West
Rosaura - Kate Fleetwood
Clotaldo - David Horovitch
Clarion - Lloyd Hutchinson
Basilio - Malcolm Storry
Astolfo - Rupert Evans
Estrella - Sharon Small
 

When Kate Fleetwood's incandescent Rosaura lays her motives bare before him, Dominic West's Segismundo grows terrified. If what she says is true, he must have been dreaming. "Is the craft of our mind's eye so skilful in its artistry, the fake becomes the thing itself?" Escalating tension between truth and illusion -- and fear made painful by hope -- governs the surprising plotting of "Life Is a Dream" thanks to the vise-like grip of Jonathan Munby's production for the Donmar Warehouse.

Helen Edmundson's immensely speakable version of Pedro Calderon de la Barca's 1635 Spanish Golden Age play opens with dishevelled Rosaura entering in search of her runaway horse. Munby goes one better. He and movement director Mike Ashcroft stage the scene in which Rosaura's horse escapes from under her. And, in the closed intimacy of the three-sided Donmar, that means no real horse, just the actors' bodies.

Paring back to reveal the dramatic power of the writing is the production's hallmark. Although the plot is wildly different, its atmosphere is not dissimilar to another tragedy-as-comedy that plays dangerous games with appearance and reality, "Much Ado About Nothing."

Like Shakespeare, Calderon uses disguises and deceits to dramatize honor and honesty. Segismundo has grown up imprisoned in a tower built by his father, King Basilio (Malcolm Storry), in an attempt to thwart the fate foretelling that his son would be a tyrant. Circumstances force Basilio to relent, and his faithful retainer Clotaldo (a beautifully measured David Horovitch) drugs his son and brings him secretly to court. But Segismundo's savagery is so extreme he is sent back to prison and told everything was a dream.

His "dream" not only teaches him about actions and consequences, it is further reversed when an uprising brings him back to the court and into confrontation with all the leading characters, who are enmeshed with one another.

One of the reasons the play is so engaging is that there are almost no heroes or villains. Good people behave badly and bad people discover goodness, resulting in morally complex action and twists that cannot be second-guessed. And, as in the end of Mozart's similar twisty "Cosi fan tutte," the seemingly happy double final coupling has a bitter aftertaste.

"Oh wretched me! Unhappy me!" cries manacled, shackled, shaven-headed West in his opening speech. Here is a man who can quite plausibly threaten, in his anguish, to "rip myself to pieces with my own hands." But instead of the expected imploring to the heavens, West's performance is rivetingly understated. Rooted in controlled physicality that's far from his shrugging, disengaged physical performance in HBO's "The Wire," West compels attention and only ever hits the heights after patiently allowing audiences to feel his pain.

Indeed, bombast is banished throughout. That's a major achievement in a play littered with long addresses that zip along, thanks to Munby's pacing of his actors. By contrast, the filled silences allow audiences to catch up with the complexity of the plotting and to feel how frightening events are for the characters.

Munby is aided by the unanimity of the design elements. There's steel-colored chill to lighting designer Neil Austin's eerie twilight; it appears to enfold and isolate Segismundo, whose troubled reveries are underscored by hovering strings.

The shivery bleakness of Angela Davies' wide-open set is balanced by high-lying gold leaf on the black back wall that gleams from gold through bronze to a bloodied crimson that bodes ill. And in a quiet masterstroke of counterintuitive staging, an advancing army is superbly realized by a snap lighting change, revealing four men lit up from below, dancing on the spot against the back wall to a defiantly unmarchlike rhythmic drumbeat.

The cast are as adept at the humor as the high drama. Fleetwood in particular lights up exchanges with fierce comic zeal as Rosaura dons yet another disguise to confront Sharon Small's scheming Estrella and save herself from disaster in the nick of time.

By the end of the night it's almost impossible not to agree with Storry's quietly arresting Basilio: "Please listen on, for you will be amazed."

Sets and costumes, Angela Davies; lighting, Neil Austin; original music, Haslam and Ansuman Biswas; sound, Dominic Haslam; movement, Mike Ashcroft; production stage manager, Maxine Foo. Opened, reviewed Oct. 13, 2009. Running time: 2 HOURS, 30 MIN.
 

With: David Smith, Dylan Turner.