Segismundo has just woken up in a palace, having spent his life holed up in a tower. In Pedro Calderón’s extraordinary Spanish golden age drama, he is astonished at the luxury he is suddenly immersed in. “Me, surrounded by all these elegant-looking servants,” he says.
Except in Wils Wilson’s production, the servants are nothing of the kind. Their look could be called punk Pierrot: all back-combed hair, eccentric makeup and bare feet. In accordance with designer Georgia McGuinness’s dressing-up-box aesthetic, their outfits are a thrown-together combination of long johns and glitz.
Their elegance is as provisional as the scrawled chalk line that marks the edge of a stage that extends across the stalls and creates a hallucinatory depth of field. Emerging from the haze of Kai Fischer’s lighting is a fake proscenium arch, distressed and decaying, an expression of the play’s theme about the real and the pretend.
With the audience on four sides, Wilson highlights the artifice. However rich and important these characters are, their privilege is stapled on, their venality only one layer of clothing down.
All this gives tremendous immediacy to Jo Clifford’s translation, first aired in a production by Calixto Bieito in 1998 and written with a heart-on-sleeve directness.
Lorn Macdonald excels as Segismundo, a young man who has spent his childhood imprisoned, in this staging, by the queen, his mother (a deliciously nasty Alison Peebles) for fear he will fulfil a prophecy that he will grow up evil. Naturally, the brutality of his upbringing turns him into exactly the monster his mother feared. Macdonald prowls the stage,grunting with coiled-up anger, switching between primal violence and existential musings on the nature of reality.
In a vigorously acted production, he meets his match in Anna Russell-Martin’s Rosaura, a woman seeking vengeance on Astolfo, the lover who abandoned her (a slippery and supercilious Dyfan Dwyfor). Fierce and ferocious, she never lets you forget the urgency of her mission, nor lets you doubt her capacity to carry it out.
Few people come out well in this (John Macaulay’s diplomatic Clotaldo gets close), showing us the cruel, animal forces cracking through an all-too-thin veneer of respectability.
At the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 20 November
