Life is a Dream After Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Life is a Dream? Even his birth took place under a bad star. Prophecies foretold a monstrous being, a tragedy ending with the murder of his father, the king of Poland. The father banished his newborn son to a tower. Many years later and in the meantime fatigued by his office, he wants to discover whether courage and intelligence cannot overcome the words of the stars. Sigismund is made Prince of Poland overnight. He is to rule on a trial basis. It is hoped that he will be capable of defeating his stars and lift the curse for ever. But things turn out differently. Intoxicated by his new power, he loses his grip on things.
The harmonious transition is over. He throws a servant from the balcony and insults both court and people; he speaks of love, yet acts violently and launches a furious attack against his own father. The very model of a nightmare. Court society is unforgiving. The accursed son is driven out for a second time. His life as a prince is explained away by his guards as having been just an episode, a mere vision. Johan Simons’s production of Life is a Dream, one of the greatest epochal works of the Spanish baroque, is metaphysical, full of peculiar reflections and surreal perspectives on things suppressed and excluded.
The quest for a new, rational world order has its price. Payment is in cash, in bloody coin - with the outbreak of violence as a slow transition into a state of galloping anomalies.