Life is a Dream

In a dark cinema or theatre at the end of a long day, nodding off is too often the swiftest shortcut to unconsciousness. No chance of that in Jonathan Munby's rich and startling production of this highly strung drama by Spain's last great Golden Age playwright, Pedro Calderon de la Barca: it winds you tightly in a glittering web of dreams.

Even in a dream, an existential seventeenth-century courtly fable is the last place you'd expect to find 'The Wire's' Dominic West. He is, nevertheless, spellbinding and muscular as the cursed Prince Segismundo, banged up from birth by his own father, an astrologer king with more faith in doom-laden horoscopes than nurture. When his father belatedly decides to test his son's nature by releasing him from prison, Segismundo seizes his opportunity with both fists, like a Caliban playing merry hell with his father's stiffly mannered court. West brings a great titanic innocence to the part; even when he chucks his courtiers over the battlements he's like a toddler, one moment in love with his new world, the next rejecting it in a superman tantrum.

De la Barca's play, with its intricately entwined nobles impaling themselves on the horns of every honourable dilemma that presents itself, is exquisitely unreal. But, like 'The Wire', it asks if men and women can be good in a fickle, violent world that may itself be an illusion. Its fierce delicacy is reminiscent of Shakespeare's late romances. So is its theme of abandoned children who grow up to seek their parents, sword in hand. It even has a cross-dressing heroine in the topographically cheek-boned shape of Kate Fleetwood, movingly heroic as heroine Rosaura.

Yes, the musical effects gild an already artificial lily. But Helen Edmunson's English script is enchanting: full of fairy-tale rhymes and plain, speakable rhythms, which Lloyd Hutchinson, as Rosaura's Sancho Panza-like servant, makes comic hay with. This likeable cynic is the only character who isn't given a second chance. But it's West's Segismundo - thrown back in prison, told his courtly interlude was a dream, then released by state rebels to raise hell - whose painful journey from beast to man is everyone's, despite its extreme expression. The old world that he looks on, with new-born compassion, is not always brave. But it looks strange and new again seen through these eyes.