Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Life is a Dream
Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca is one of the most beautifully written texts in the whole of dramatic literature. The Spanish poet of the stage used an enchantingly imaginative and admirably focused plot to create a suggestive and fluid play, as modern as the fantasy and the story, freedom and cruelty, darkness and dream. The vibrancy and the bareness of the play's verses go hand in hand, offering the 21st century actors a chance to become total performers, to simultaneously act out a contemplative and theatrical play, to face both the past and the present and speak of illusion and reality. Rene Medvešek is a director who intensively deals with speech as a means of an actor's expression. Life is a Dream is, undoubtedly, a play with a particularly stressed ''speech moment'', woven out of lines that not only mean, but sound as well and therefore have to be transferred onto the stage with special attention and the awareness of their magical elegance and seductive ambiguity. Alongside it comes the playfulness, which is something Medvešek uses regularly as a mode of forming the stage material. And playfulness is certainly something Calderón abounds in, using his meandering story to charm us constantly, that way both we and Sigismund are not quite certain what is a dream and what is reality...
