Life Is A Dream
Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

THREE centuries before psychoanalysis, Spanish playwright Pedro Calderon proposed his own “interpretation of dreams.”

After a trauma that has disposed of the father and left the mother in charge, the thing she most fears has been locked away. This is the price of courtly stability and a fragile peace in the realm.

Life Is A Dream opens when the trapdoor is flung back and the unconscious emerges to take revenge in the form of a snarling humanoid, a bundle of primitive drives supercharged by sex and aggression.

The story by which this primal monster of the human psyche achieves human identity is timeless and universal and, for all the trappings of 17th-century feudalism, it is profoundly relevant to the mental health crisis of our own time.

The urgent need to be reacquainted with the dangers of repression and the difficult path to selfhood is what drives the lucid clarity of Jo Clifford’s exceptional translation.

The characters speak as though astonished to find themselves in these roles, unable to understand one another and desperate in their distress. The language is contemporary, pointed and exquisitely articulate.

Sigismundo, the confined prince, howls with Freudian clarity that “my crime is existence.” Lorn MacDonald holds nothing back in his commitment to a role that requires a believable metamorphosis from animal to human and, in a definitive performance, he nails the combination of raw physicality and articulate control demanded by this near impossible part.

He is surrounded by a marvellously detailed ensemble. Alison Peebles, as his calculating and distraught mother brings visionary panache to the alert and spidery matriarch, and her presence speaks for the legacy of Communicado and Scottish theatre to make classic productions of European masterworks.

The effete Dyfan Dwyfor and the feisty Anna Russell Martin tussle and tango with vicious hilarity as lovers roasted on the spit of ambition and honour, and even in the smallest part Krystian Godlewski, who represents the “fierce energy of the common people,” commands his corner of the argument and his own struggle for sanity within the Freudian nightmare.

The whole production is interwoven with live music, haunting Spanish melodies sung with melancholic purity by Nerea Bello, and it is contained within the decadent gold of an auditorium that has been completely refigured into its own version of the Globe.

This is brilliant and bold design, making a theatre in the round that amplifies the drama and is fit to contain a totalised view of humanity.

Set in an imaginary Poland, this self-aware dream also carries its own echo of contemporary politics to unsettle any easy answers or simplistic vision of human nature.

Is the new rule of Sigismundo, that has been born with untrammelled violence, not akin to the revenge that the Polish right wing is taking against civil society even as we speak?

As we all emerge from our own enforced confinement, this production, postponed for 18 months, could not be more timely. It’s just a shame that it can’t stay in repertory for a few years as such classic productions do in Europe.

Until November 20. Tickets: www.lyceum.org.uk.