What an extraordinary and fascinating play this is. Written by Pedro Calderon de la Barca in 1635, it is brilliantly revived here by the Donmar. It starts out as a dark fairy tale, develops into a grim parable of man’s terminal incapacity to follow the right path or master his fate, appears to be heading towards outright tragedy and chaos, King Lear-style, with a kingdom torn apart by father and son leading armies against each other — only to end with not one but two happy marriages, and everything at peace. Or is it?

The resonances are almost too numerous, the echoes too many, the philosophical depths bottomless. Its extraordinary modernity and nonrealism suggest Kafka and Beckett — Kafka especially, perhaps, with those little parables of his about how we can never know the truth, as well as the play’s central image of unjustified, or at least incomprehensible, incarceration and punishment.

The rich and complex story starts with a traveller, Rosaura, in the kingdom of Poland, encountering Segismundo alone in a prison tower. He has known only his gaoler since birth. Nothing makes sense to him. Why is he imprisoned, what is his crime? Then we pass to the court, and learn that Segismundo is heir to the throne. Atrocious though it may seem, he has been incarcerated for life because his father, the scholarly, unworldly, well meaning Basilio, learnt long ago from studying the stars that his son would grow up a tyrant and bring ruin on the country. Ah — but what better way to make someone cruel and tyrannical than by such treatment?

Dominic West is a powerful physical presence as Segismundo, his curly locks shaven away, convict-style. The subplot involving Rosaura has been seen as weak and bolted-on, but here it appears central to the story, thanks not least to a feisty performance by Kate Fleetwood as the woman wronged. And Lloyd Hutchinson is hilarious as her manservant, Clarion, with his ingratiating smirk and his Falstaffian (or perhaps Sancho Panzan) scorn for high-flown language and the bubble, reputation. He just wants to stay alive. “I kiss your feet a thousand times,” Rosaura cries at one point, by way of gratitude. “I... don’t,” says Clarion, “but I am very, very pleased.”

With the menacing inevitability of Greek tragedy, however, no amount of human planning or cunning can avoid what the prophecies have foretold. Segismundo comes to the throne anyway, and proves himself a tyrant. After only one day, his father has him thrown back in jail. It was all a dream.

Yet Calderon goes further. Segismundo gets a second chance to rule, and this time vows to be just. Yet even amid the “happy” ending, in a truly Shakespearian touch, one character is killed, and not the one you would expect. There is no explanation for it. In war, people are killed. It’s a dense plot, but it goes at a cracking pace, thanks not least to a superb adaptation by Helen Edmundson, responsible for triumphs such as the National Theatre’s Coram Boy and Shared Experience's War & Peace. The lines gallop along, mostly in unrhymed iambic tetrameters, and Jonathan Munby’s direction is similarly deft and speedy.

Angela Davies’s set is austerely beautiful, with the Donmar’s towering back wall covered in tattered, peeling gold (Aztec and Inca gold, mostly) and a huge chandelier, composed of tilted concentric rings, like the revolutions of the stars and the planets, presiding over the destinies of men below. Fine production though it is, however, the play itself is most definitely the star. For anyone unsure about the appeal of classical theatre of the Spanish golden age, Life Is a Dream will be a revelation.

Whether life is a dream or not, the play seems to be saying, even in dreams we should strive to be merciful and just. And, yes, it probably is all a dream, especially the dreamlike unreality of power. One moment Segismundo is a prisoner in rags and chains, the next he is wearing a crown and seated on a golden throne. As Marlowe said: “But what are kings, when regiment is gone, but perfect shadows in a sunshine day?”

And behind this haunting sense of transience, although barely mentioned — this is a play stripped of overt Christian doctrine or iconography as severely as anything in Shakespeare — there is the sense that, after the tormented and incomprehensible dream of life is over, we will finally awaken.

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