WINNER
CRITICS AWARDS FOR THEATRE IN SCOTLAND
BEST DIRECTOR, Wils Wilson
BEST DESIGN, Georgia McGuinness, Alex Berry, Kai Fischer
BEST PERFORMANCE, Lorn Macdonald (Segismundo)
IAN CHARLSTON AWARDS
Lorn MacDonald (Segismundo)
Anna Russell-Martin (Rosaura)
UK THEATRE AWARDS
BEST DESIGN nomination, Best Design - Georgia McGuinness
***** Guardian
Segismundo has just woken up in a palace, having spent his life holed up in a tower. In Pedro Calderón’s extraordinary Spanish golden age drama, he is astonished at the luxury he is suddenly immersed in. “Me, surrounded by all these elegant-looking servants,” he says.
Except in Wils Wilson’s production, the servants are nothing of the kind. Their look could be called punk Pierrot: all back-combed hair, eccentric makeup and bare feet. In accordance with designer Georgia McGuinness’s dressing-up-box aesthetic, their outfits are a thrown-together combination of long johns and glitz.
Their elegance is as provisional as the scrawled chalk line that marks the edge of a stage that extends across the stalls and creates a hallucinatory depth of field. Emerging from the haze of Kai Fischer’s lighting is a fake proscenium arch, distressed and decaying, an expression of the play’s theme about the real and the pretend.
With the audience on four sides, Wilson highlights the artifice. However rich and important these characters are, their privilege is stapled on, their venality only one layer of clothing down.
Read the full review here.
***** The Stage
Director Wils Wilson deserves applause for a real triumph, in which a multitude of timely resonances are rich and well-balanced: from the duty of rulers and revolutionaries alike to act with justice and morality, to the internal peace which Rosaura must find with the gender roles she inhabits as she takes to war, and the existential pact all humans make with life in the face of adversity. Thinking of it all as a dream, like Segismundo, might often be the best way to get through.
Read the full review here
**** The Scotsman
In the midst of his pell-mell journey towards lust, self-sacrifice and a ferocious civil war, though, Segismundo becomes seized by the idea that life – and its surreal reversals of fortune – is only a dream, not to be trusted or believed; and it’s this thought that opens the door to the wild, slightly punk-inflected brilliance and energy of Wils Wilson’s Lyceum production, played out on the fabulous oval extended stage built across the Lyceum stalls during lockdown. Powerfully blurring the distinction between stage and auditorium, the space forms a perfect arena for Jo Clifford’s playful and brilliant 1998 version of Calderon’s text, now substantially updated. And the top-flight company Wilson has assembled for this Lyceum reopening – led by a superb Alison Peebles as the Queen, an intensely physical Lorn Macdonald as Segismundo, a furious Anna Russell-Martin as Segismundo’s object of desire Rosaura, and a superb Laura Lovemore as the wise-cracking clown, Clarin – seize and run with the play for all it’s worth, barely pausing in an arc of action that lasts two and a quarter hours without an interval.
***** All Edinburgh Theatre
‘mesmerically enticing… it fills your head for hours afterwards with whirling fancies and endless possibilities. ’
**** The Observer
**** The Times
Director - Wils Wilson
Designer - Georgia McGuinness
Associate Designer - Alex Berry
Composer - Davey Anderson
Lighting - Kai Fischer
Movement - Janice Parker
Sound - Calum Paterson
Cast
Singer and Musician - Nerea Bello
Astolfo - Dyfan Dwyfor
Servant/Solder/Musician - Krystian Godlewski
Estrella - Kelsey Griffin
Segismundo - Lorn MacDonald
Clotaldo - John Macaulay
Clarin - Laura Lovemore
Basilio = Alison Peebles
Rosaura - Anna Russell-Martin
Photography: Ryan Buchanan