Offering close readings of five productions of La vida es sueño, Pedro Calderón de la Barca's most important play, this book brings an innovative methodological approach to a field dominated by textual studies.


WINNER: 2022-23 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize


Recentring actors and their techniques as key elements of performance and critical analysis, it examines the hypothetical première (ca. 1632), drawing on the original suelta edition and early seventeenth-century acting-related texts, as well as four modern adaptations from Spain's Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico staged in 1996, 2000, 2012 and 2022-24. While directing and design elements are acknowledged, the acting itself - performative choices involving gesture, movement, body position, vocality, emotionality, declamation, and the use of space - is brought to the fore. This focus on the actors' bodies and their visceral and ideological impact upon audiences is combined with an exploration of wider aesthetic and socio-political questions.

Modern interpretations tend to privilege either recitation or corporealness. The first type, sanctifying the text, is normally politically unengaged; the second type overemphasizes the comedia's physicality but at the same time engages more closely with contemporary socio-political themes. By examining these performative choices, and the balance between oratory and embodiment, the book enables a better understanding of the different ways La vida es sueño and early modern Spanish theatre more generally have been interpreted in canonical contemporary productions, and of how these interpretations are intertwined with broader issues concerning violence and ideology in the play.