Life is a Dream

Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca is one of the most beautifully written texts in the whole of dramatic literature. The Spanish poet of the stage used an enchantingly imaginative and admirably focused plot to create a suggestive and fluid play, as modern as the fantasy and the story, freedom and cruelty, darkness and dream. The vibrancy and the bareness of the play's verses go hand in hand, offering the 21st century actors a chance to become total performers, to simultaneously act out a contemplative and theatrical play, to face both the past and the present and speak of illusion and reality. Rene Medvešek is a director who intensively deals with speech as a means of an actor's expression. Life is a Dream is, undoubtedly, a play with a particularly stressed ''speech moment'', woven out of lines that not only mean, but sound as well and therefore have to be transferred onto the stage with special attention and the awareness of their magical elegance and seductive ambiguity. Alongside it comes the playfulness, which is something Medvešek uses regularly as a mode of forming the stage material. And playfulness is certainly something Calderón abounds in, using his meandering story to charm us constantly, that way both we and Sigismund are not quite certain what is a dream and what is reality...

''Life is a Dream is an elegant, almost classical production, moderately traditional in the mise-en-scene and the style of acting and it is entirely grounded on an intransient and humanistic value of Calderon's neoplatonic alegory. (...) Generally seen, Gavella Theatre has finally produced a clean, clear, precise, ''gavellianesque'' play: for the younger - an image (a dream or a shadow) of what the theatre once was and to what it will be forced to return (if it wants to survive).'' (Boris B. Horvat, ''Vjesnik'')

''Franjo Dijak plays the part of Sigismund, the imprisoned, then released, then imprisoned again prince who cannot discern what is a dream and what is reality. Dijak is simply brilliant, tender and frantic, insane and composed, desperate and contemplative, mad as an adolescent and open as a little child who discovers the world. In the process he remains completely physical, every emotion is seen on his body that impecably tells the story of a mental and emotional roller-coaster the young prince is on. Dijak's Sigismund carries the play. (...) Dijana Vidušin plays the part of Rosauro with a sincere energetic passion. Her servant is played by Ozren Grabarić. It is the only comic character in the play, inventively written as a classic fool who tells more truth than the wise men. Grabarić wonderfully uses every single moment given to him to make a humorous digression from the prevailing seriousness.''
(Iva Gruić, Jutarnji list'')

''The impressive set design by Tanja Lacko is finalized by a remarkable baroque chandelier, made of theatre flodlights, that additionally blurs the thin
line between the reality and the illusion. Doris Krstić designed persuasive costumes belonging to the epoch.'' (Matko Baotić, Kulisa.eu)