In Life Is a Dream we see Dominic West in an austere version of 17th-century Poland, and instead of the self-destructive charm of The Wire’s boozy Detective McNulty we are treated to a performance that combines lofty existential angst and poetic hyperbole.

The play, which dates from 1635, is the most celebrated achievement of Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

As court dramatist to Philip IV of Spain, he was expected to engage with matters of contemporary moral and social interest: hence his concern in this play with astrology, honour and the difficulties of kingship.

The close-cropped West is Segismundo, a Polish prince shut up in a tower since birth because omens have suggested he will prove evil.

When we first encounter him he is scantily dressed in rags — a tantalising prospect for some, though more jittery readers should rest assured that West never actually gets all his kit off.

Segismundo’s father, the king, decides to test the prophecy. He has Segismundo drugged and brought to the palace, arguing that “tendencies can be constrained”.

The play takes off, after an uncertain first 45 minutes, when the released Segismundo, treated royally, disappoints his father by living up (or down) to the portents, flinging a servant off a balcony and generally behaving like a man whose idea of light relief is a pipe of crystal meth.

West does a good job of conveying his character’s petulance and brawling stupidity. Segismundo turns out to be a capricious savage: the experiment is deemed to have failed, and his chains are fastened again.

His mood now shifts. “We dream our lives until we wake,” he reflects, sensing how elusive reality can be.

Later, after he has learnt to curb his violence, he gets the chance to sample freedom afresh, prompting further questions about the gulf between fantasy and truth.

Segismundo’s delusional fugues recall those of his near-contemporary, Don Quixote, and the emphasis on the burden of fate evokes the Oedipus myth.

The play pulses with biblical imagery of transience, monstrosity, sinfulness and vanity — for which Angela Davies’s spare yet artful set, centred on what looks rather like an orrery, creates a suggestive framework.

Besides the ferally charismatic West, the standout performance is that of Kate Fleetwood as Rosaura, the spiritually determined woman to whom Segismundo is attracted.

She exults in her passages of high rhetoric, but also has an intriguingly predatory stillness.
It is brave of the Donmar to stage work by Calderón. Undeniably one of the giants of the Spanish golden age, he is a dramatist of forbidding baroque formality.

There are many lengthy soliloquies, which even in Helen Edmundson’s carefully lyrical translation appear verbose. Jonathan Munby’s direction may be mostly vigorous and witty, yet the action is spasmodic. There are moments when Segismundo bears comparison with Hamlet, and the temper of the play is Shakespearean. But while the acting is bracing, the

attention to moral responsibility feels turgid, and the ending seems woefully glib.
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