Life Is A Dream
A note from Claudia and Solomon:
From Claudia:
To my mind, Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream offers one of the most thrilling provocations theatre can explore: what happens to us as humans, and, by extension, as audiences, when the boundaries between the real and the fictive begin to blur?
Our initial response to this work was just that: to invite an audience into a space and ask them to question where the line between the world of the play and reality begins to dissolve.
But as Solomon and I spent more time in the room, unpicking Calderon’s ideas around prophecy, fate, and free will in search of a more contemporary centre, a deeper question (and theatrical provocation) began to emerge: What even is reality for someone who has been confined to a single room their entire life? Can that reality bear any real relationship to our own? And as a parent, if that world was your only option, what would it look like to try and make it work, or to make it function, for someone you love?
We’ve taken a Spanish epic and tried to contain it to a world as small and familiar as possible to ask, what are the myths we tell the ones we love to survive? How easily can our sense of morality bend in the name of love, or under the illusion of it? What is our capacity for violence and cruelty when love is on the line?
From Solomon:
Claudia and I had never met - maybe once or twice in a foyer. The first call we had about this play she called me from New York. "Why don't we lock an actor in the downstairs at Belvoir and live stream it. It can be like Calderon's play LIfe is a dream." I was in. Belvoir was not. "Too risky"
So, we were left with Calderon’s play. And we had to adapt it. But how do you adapt a play about fate into something contemporary without being able to lock an actor up for weeks.
I don't think I want to be a dad. I just don't have the urge. But I love talking about parenting. My parents broke up when I was nine and then my dad and stepmum had two kids - my half-brothers. I watched them get raised differently to me and my sisters. Not completely, but enough that I could really see the difference. What worked, what didn't. How sometimes no matter what they did, it was the kid's nature that came through. But also, how the stories they told us as kids became the stories me and my siblings tell ourselves to this day. How my parents' attitude toward the world sits so deeply in my stomach that I can never dredge it up enough to see it clearly. It's just there. You can't change that shit.
Team:
written by Claudia Osborne
co-directed by Claudia Osborne and Solomon Thomas
set and costume design by Cris Baldwin
lighting design by Kelsey Lee
sound design by Madeleine Picard
dramaturg Imogen Gardam
stage manager: Archer Dametto
assistant stage manager: Emma Clulow
creative producer: Malcolm Whittaker
administration: Intimate Spectacle
images: Phil Erbacher and Solomon Thomas
with: Thomas Campbell, Mark Lee, Shiv Palekar, Essie Randles, Ariadne Sgouros, Ariyan Sharma