Life is a Dream

Last December’s premiere of Life is a Dream in war-torn Ukraine was a moment of both excitement and uncertainty. But the air alarms did not sound in Kyiv, the country’s capital, and this adaptation of Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño was performed in full. It was a special occasion to see a Spanish classic spoken in Ukrainian.

The project was born from the Spanish Embassy in Ukraine and the Spanish Agency for Cooperation in 2022, at the outset of the war, when Ukrainian institutions were seeking to revive cultural life. Two of the leading experts in Spanish Golden Age theatre, stage director Ignacio García and José Gabriel López Antuñano, who wrote the play, travelled to Ukraine and held a workshop to prepare the production, which ultimately came to life with the Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Drama Theatre.

Eight actors, on an austere stage that echoed the scarcity imposed by war, condensed the drama of La vida es sueño, a play that tells of a nation (Poland) at risk of being overtaken by a duchy (Muscovy), and the possibility that a bad ruler could be replaced by a foreign power seizing control. This plot, so closely mirroring Ukraine’s current situation, reveals the enduring relevance of Calderón’s play, whose central theme, according to director Ignacio García, is “the duality between what one is and what one believes oneself to be.” And it is precisely this duality that the country is experiencing now, “as its citizens have not yet awoken from the shock of the Russian invasion; they cannot understand how they have gone from living in a liberal European society to being attacked indiscriminately.”

At certain points, the production breaks the fourth wall, as the actors step out of their roles to address the audience directly, speaking about the same issues that Calderón and Ukrainian society are questioning: freedom, identity, and dreams.

For Spanish audiences, García says, “it will be a revelation to see on stage this dilemma between freedom and totalitarianism,” with the resonance of a country at war, grappling with the same dilemma.