Sydney Reviews

“Dangerous and destructive but not in this room”, becomes a mantra of sorts, a powerful refrain, in Life is a Dream, Claudia Osborne’s fascinating reworking of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play about fate, free will and the fevered boundaries of reality.

On entering the space, audiences are confronted with Cris Baldwin’s set design, a single bed room with a map on the wall and copies of National Geographic magazines strewn on the floor, together with a line of VHS tapes in domino enticing distance and a cabinet containing more video tapes and a portable TV on top.

The occupant of the room is a twenty-two year old male who wily whiles away the apparently enforced time in his enclosure by amusing himself with blowing ping pong balls, hand-spanning the walls, setting off the VHS dominoes and watching video tapes of childhood birthday parties.

Enter another man, maybe a father, certainly a mentor, declaring disciplinary missives on study and room tidiness. There’s verbal to and fro and a game of badminton. Intrigue is manifested, magnified by a literal injection of surprise.

Now another birthday party, in real time, not recorded, and not a children’s party but a celebration of sixty years, although a calibration seems a more apt word, as the celebrant is a clinical, cold and conniving individual, convening the anniversary gathering to create a cat among the pigeons scenario within his family.

Life is a Dream becomes a nightmare of revelation, of errant parenting, prodigious entitlement and the denial that the fault is not in ourselves but in our stars.

A central sextet of actors comprising Ariyan Sharma, Shiv Palekar, Thomas Campbell, Mark Lee, Essie Randles and the incomparable Ariadne Sgouros bring this Lear like narrative to robust and violent life, with the added bonus of a guest singer who brings tangible textural dimension to the narrative’s continually surprising fabric.

With nuanced direction by Solomon Thomas and Claudia Osborne, Life is a Dream is illusory but not elusive, a production that leaves an imaginative impression, an awakening to a contemplative reverie.

Plundering of five hundred year old texts is to be applauded if done with the aplomb of these talented creatives.