Dream/Life

Are we waking or are we sleeping? How do we know? Does it matter? So asks May Miller, one of the Royal Court Theatre’s young writers, in Dream/Life, a new play based on the 17^th century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón’s allegorical play Life is a Dream.

For those unfamiliar with it, Life is a Dream is the story of a king who, thanks to a prophecy foretelling that his son would prove a tyrannical ruler, keeps the prince locked in a tower. One day, however, the King decides to put the prophecy to the test. In typical Golden Age style there are subplots  involving cross-dressing, long-lost fathers and daughters, and a few philandering men.

Miller writes using heavy mock-Shakespearean iambic pentameter. At its best, this adds to the dream-like quality of her play, at its worst it can make her writing laboured and verging on parody.

KUDOS’s staging is imaginative. And, in a manner which seems especially appropriate for the indeterminate world of dreams, white sheets are used to represent everything from Plato-esque caves to chains, to royal robes, to dressing rooms.

Miller’s play shows her to be a writer of some potential, yet her achievement would have been greater had she been more radical in the use of her source material. Then her play might feel less like an adaptation and more like the re-interpretation it purports to be.