A year ago at the Edinburgh festival I described Calixto Bieito's production of Calderon's 1635 Spanish play as sensational. Now I'd settle for austerely impressive. It still works but there are times when I wonder whether its dominant image of a circular cinder-track and a giant tilted mirror does quite enough to clarify the action or give it a local habitation.
Of the greatness of Calderon's play there is little doubt. It revolves around a Polish prince, Segismundo, who is locked in a tower by his father because of a prophecy that he will usurp the throne. And when the prince is briefly paroled, he fulfils his father's fears by behaving like a savage beast. Bunged back in the tower, Segismundo is finally released by a popular uprising but this time behaves with greater restraint: he forgives his enemies, punishes his allies and metes out marital justice rather like the duke at the end of Measure for Measure.
What strikes one about the play today is its modernity. Not so much the idea that life is a transient dream; that, as Gwynne Edwards points out in the Methuen edition of the play, is a commonplace of oriental and Christian religions. Much more radical is Calderon's notion of the futility of preventive punishment. In his great final speech Segis mundo says of his father: "Because he treated me like an animal I became a savage beast." He goes on to argue that evil can be defeated not by injustice and cruelty but only "by courage, intelligence and strength". Words that home secretaries, past and present, would do well to ponder as the political parties gather in Bournemouth and Blackpool.
The play is, literally and metaphorically, about the hero's progress from darkness to light: a point strongly made in the performance of George Anton who moves from a mad Caligula, hurling servants out of windows and diving under women's skirts, to a rational ruler. He is swayed by the mysterious Rosaura who is here endowed by Olwen Fouere with androgynous force. Jeffery Kissoon plays Segismundo's dad, the bungling Basilio, with the self-righteousness of the smugly wise. Bieito's conceptual production could do more to convey the play's long night's journey into day but John Clifford's colloquial translation ensures we grasp its piercing contemporary relevance.
At the Barbican (0171-638 8891) until October 2.
