A perplexing but beguiling journey
Life is a Dream Rambert, Sadler’s Wells
★★★★★
Life is a Dream goes to great, even baroque lengths to perplex. The latest work from big-league choreographer Kim Brandstrup, it has as its cornerstone and chief inspiration the 1630s play of the same name by the Spanish “Golden Age” dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca. That musing on free will versus fate tells of a (fictional) Polish prince, imprisoned in a tower by his father the king, in the wake of a prophecy that says he will bring destruction to the country.
The king does fleetingly free his son, but the latter goes on such a hedonistic rampage – as well the poor fellow might – that the king incarcerates him again, persuading him that his days of liberty were all a dream. This, in turn, leads the prince to wonder which is more real: that so-called “dream”? Or life inside his cell?
The first half of Brandstrup’s very dance-theatrical piece – Rambert’s first new narrative full-evening work since Glen Tetley’s The Tempest in 1979, and the venerable Mark Baldwin’s final commission as he steps down as the company’s grand vizier
– is set in a large, derelict, crepuscular warehouse. It begins with a theatre director, played by both Liam Francis (initially asleep at his desk, after a rehearsal of the play) and Miguel Altunaga (fleshing out his thoughts). In his mind, the actors return to the space in an attempt to get to grips with the play, and they’re soon lining up behind the sleeping figure as he suddenly, magically, finds he can manipulate them all like flesh-andblood marionettes.
So far, so good – and with an atmosphere that you can virtually drink. Opting for forboding and frantic music by the late Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, played live, Brandstrup has also taken inspiration from the austerity and anarchy of Polish theatre of the Fifties and Sixties. Together with Quay Brothers (design), Jean Kalman (lighting) and Ian Dearden (sound), he has here created a beguiling, vaguely nostalgic world that seems to exist just at the corner of one’s memories and perception, a flickering dreamscape with a dash of the silent movie about it. Deftly engineered projections allow strange images to flood the room without warning, and trees to rustle in the moonlight through the room’s windows, while sounds – at times, somewhere between waves breaking, electrical static and the soft crackle of a needle on vinyl – tease the ears.
However, there’s a very fine line between seductive mystery and exasperating confusion, and the piece is soon straddling it. As ever, Brandstrup deploys his dancers with authority, using somehow apt “freezeframes” amid the movement and whipping up some moments that really stick in the memory (that early scene of human puppetry; the director’s later, mirror-like dance with himself). But, with two (or is it three?) different casts of actors simultaneously playing out the drama in the director’s mind, there’s also a decidedly busy, hectic edge to many of the ensembles. Stir in the actors’ constant role-swapping, their elegant-but-monochromatic costumes, and that artfully tenebrous lighting in which the whole thing plays out, and you may often have little or no idea who is doing what to whom, or why.
Accurately dreamlike? Arguably so. But, given that most of the characters are barely established before that swapping begins, it’s also a little like seeing the rule book jettisoned before you’ve got a handle on what the rules actually were.
Also, anyone hoping for some second-act relief from the murk will be disappointed. After the elaborate imagery of Act I’s dreamscape – complete with a super, projection-led coup de théâtre at its close – Act II sees the director escape into the outside world, only to find it ultimately inferior to the world in his own head. Here, the design team resort to the stripped-back-sadler’s-stage ploy to make their point (an affectation-of-abstinence that’s become a bit of a cliché), while both the virtues and vices of Act I’s choreography remain.
Though I wish I could bid Baldwin farewell with a more overwhelmingly positive notice, Brandstrup’s piece – performed with typically Rambertian sensitivity, discipline and punch – in fact is in many ways a suitable swansong for this immensely likeable New Zealander who has run Britain’s flagship contemporary dance company since 2002. Not only has he kept the standard of dancers and dancing market-leadingly high, he has also, as both a commissioner and a creator of new works, displayed an unquenchable thirst for taking risks.
After 15 never-dull years, he leaves the company looking very healthy indeed, and with a brand-new, hugely ambitious, at once flawed and beautiful dance work about dance; about invention, collaboration and creativity; about imagination versus the so-called real world. Far from shoddy, eh?
Until May 26. Tickets: 020 7863 8000; sadlerswells.com