Underpinned by an act of self-serving cruelty, Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life is a Dream (1635) has long attracted theatre-makers eager to draw out its contemporary resonances. The play’s premise – a prince, Segismundo, imprisoned from birth by his father King Basilio on receiving advice from an oracle – has proved fertile ground for centuries of reinterpretation.

In recent times, de la Barca’s meditation on power and the divine right of kings has increasingly been recast as a philosophical inquiry into reality itself.

In Segismundo’s plight – confined to a cell with a single companion since infancy – modern audiences are  confrontated with a stark consideration of nature and nurture, a theme later echoed in Marivaux’s La Dispute a century or so later.

Ariyan Sharma in Life is a Dream. Photo © Phil Erbacher

This new version, written by Claudia Osbourne (who co-directs with Solomon Thomas), renders Calderón’s classic in plain, modern language and at domestic scale. Segismundo (Ariyan Sharma) inhabits what resembles a suburban teenager’s bedroom, stocked with carefully sanctioned books, colouring pens and a daily ration of worksheets delivered by Clotaldo (Thomas Campbell), his conflicted jailer and surrogate parent.

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