Part fairy tale, part Biblical epic, part Picaresque adventure, part Jacobean revenge tragedy, and yes, part comedy, it’s safe to say that Pedro Calderon’s 1635 epic defies neat definitions.
But such is the confidence of director Jonathan Munby in his pacy storytelling of a young Prince called Segismundo (Dominic West) imprisoned by his father (Malcolm Storry) because of some dodgy portents about his future reign, that it is also an absorbing, profound and moral meditation on life and reality. Sometimes the imagery is so magnificent and translucent that it feels as if we have disinterred a lost Shakespeare, and there are shades of Measure for Measure’s Duke and Bottom’s dream as Segismundo is drugged and brought to court by a father keen to test whether he really is the savage foretold.
Of course, there is a powerfully modern sense that we are actually the sum total of our experiences, whether it’s Segismundo’s incarceration or the bitterness of the wronged warrior woman Rosaura, but this is no simple morality tale and there are enough laughs to mitigate the presence of some rather long, sometimes over elaborate speeches - a gun can sometimes just be a gun and not a metal snake, you know.
Told against a spare black backdrop and with some thuddingly ominous music, the performances shine as they need to, with West a particular revelation, growing from the animal emerging blinking into courtly life after a lifetime shut away, his eyes glinting with hunger and carnal desire, into a noble prince. Praise too to Lloyd Hutchinson’s clownish Clarion, a masterclass in comic acting and timing.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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