Dreaming identities into being

The Arts: Modern themes of transformation are at the heart of Calderón's 'Life is a Dream', says transgender writer Jo Clifford, translator of Rough Magic's revival of the 17th-century Spanish play

BARRY MCGOVERN ROOTS around in his bag for a playscript and fishes it out with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. In the tattered, dog-eared copy, its jacket cover long since shed and lost, he finds notes etched in the margins in his careful handwriting. "NB: Beginning of Segismundo's regeneration," reads one. "Daring, forward!" goes another. "Dramatic tension" is underlined with the vigour of an urgent discovery.

These are not the sort of mint-fresh insights you might hope to find in a script belonging to one of Ireland's most recognisable stage actors, particularly for a play as curious and probing as Life is a Dream, by the 17th-century writer, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, which has now been directed by Tom Creed for Rough Magic theatre company. As it happens, though, these are old student notes for the original Spanish text of La vida es sueño, written by one Barry K McGovern in 1969 when he was still a student of English, French and Spanish in UCD.

"I'm a magpie," McGovern says in that familiar warm and roughened voice which will forever - and slightly to his chagrin - be associated with Beckettian performance. "I keep everything."

He also seems to mark everything. His current script for the play's English-language translation may be a new copy, but the rehearsal room has already left it almost as damaged as the text that helped him "scrape a bad degree" from UCD. His dialogue, as the tormented jailer, Clotaldo, is underlined neatly in red ink. Some things never change. But a more intriguing annotation has been made to the play's title page, where, with a few strokes of a pencil, the name of the play's translator has been scrupulously altered from John to Jo Clifford.

The play, a classic of Spain's Golden Age, is itself a panoply of transformations, where a Polish prince who has spent his life in prison is suddenly anointed a nation's ruler. Initially, he behaves like a tyrant, the product of his savage incarceration, but ultimately he becomes a revolutionary hero, while a subplot revolves around a dishonoured young woman who disguises herself as a man in order to seek vengeance.

FOR JO CLIFFORD, though, one of Scotland's most prominent playwrights, who has been "transgendered for as long as I remember", changing identities has been remarkably more complicated.

"I discovered theatre through becoming an actor at school," Clifford says when we meet, her conversation infused with warmth and amusement even when discussing painful subjects. "I hated the school I went to, absolutely hated it. It was an all-boys school. I always ended up paying the girls' parts and I loved playing girls' roles. I felt far more at ease being a girl than I was being a boy. That was 1965 or 1966. To discover that, at that stage, was completely horrifying, just totally terrifying. And the only way forward for me, as far as I could tell, was to try to suppress that side of myself and try to live as a normal young man."

For many years that also meant suppressing a career in the theatre, so entwined had its association become with Clifford's sexual identity.

Following studies in Spanish and Arabic at St Andrews University in Edinburgh, Clifford married Sue Innes, the writer and feminist campaigner, remaining with her for 33 years until her death in 2005. Having abandoned a PhD on Calderón - "It seemed like a waste of time" - and pursued a variety of alternative careers as a bus conductor, a yoga instructor and a nurse, Clifford eventually decided to pursue writing and finish the thesis. This led to a translation of a Calderón comedy which became a box-office disaster at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1980. The favourable response of the 15 or so people who did see it, however, was enough to encourage Clifford to continue, "so I owe my being a playwright to Calderón".

Clifford has written numerous other translations and adaptations, from Goethe's Faustto García Lorca's Blood Wedding, as well as several original texts, such as 2003's God's New Frock, a play about growing up as a transsexual under the frowning watch of an Old Testament God. Yet Calderón has remained a touchstone. Clifford's success with another translation of the Spanish writer's Schism in Englandled to the translation of Life is a Dream, first staged by controversial director Calixto Bieito in 1998.

The play itself has an elusive identity, a heady mix of morality tale, revenge tragedy and philosophical drama, in which the conflict between free will and predestination takes centre-stage. There is even more to it than that. If the engine of the play seems like a Sophoclean tragedy - in which the cruel efforts to prevent Segismundo's destiny only bring it into being - the cross-dressing ploys of jealous lovers forcibly recall Shakespearean comedy, while characters that step outside the drama or deliver countless asides to the audience seem to anticipate the self-conscious theatricality of Pirandello and absurdist theatre. All this conspires to make a play that seems at once pre-modern and postmodern.

This, however, was par for the course in 17th-century Spain, Clifford explains, when the theatre catered to every strata of society, from the groundlings (or mosqueteros) standing by the stage, all the way up to the royal box. In an effort to satisfy everybody, a playwright's scope had to encompass everything from high poetry to low comedy. Today, Clifford admits, audiences unfamiliar with the rules "are a bit disoriented for the first hour as they try to work out what kind of show this is".

McGovern agrees. "You've got to establish it for an audience," he says. "You have to try to be faithful to the play that was written in the 17th century, but make it relevant for now - because the theme is as relevant as ever. It's a very Shakespearean or, as you say, Sophoclean theme, or even Beckettian if we can go there."

Indeed we can. McGovern, whose conversation is a charming clutter of erudite allusions, may joke about having been "tarred with the brush of Beckett" early in his career, but he finds a clear existentialist kinship between the writers.

"Beckett loved Calderón's line, early on: 'Man's greatest sin is to have been born'," he enthuses, tracing a clear echo to Waiting for Godot. "Obviously Beckett knew this play. One of the great things that has always obsessed mankind in art is what it is to be. Shakespeare, Beckett, Dante, Goethe - they all ask why we are here and why we're driven to do what we do. So it's interesting to do a play that deals with these essential matters."

IT IS ALSOa shrewdly subversive drama, both politically and sexually, dealing with the ephemerality of power and the porousness of gender. In one extraordinary speech, Rosaura, the wronged woman who has since cast off her male disguise, lends support to Segismundo on the battlefield, addressing him neither as a woman nor a man, but as both.

"As a woman, I come to beg for your pity," she announces, "when I fall helpless at your feet. As a man, I come to aid you with my sword and my fierce courage. If you love me as a woman, as a man I'll fight to the death."

"And that's not me," says Clifford, nodding. "That's Calderón in the 1630s - that's what's astonishing. That's one of the things that really attracted me to Calderón, because, throughout his work, there's a huge preoccupation with the relationship between the sexes which is very modern and extraordinary for its time. But that's the way with women's history and transsexual history: we're a presence in history that has been discounted really."

Written during the Golden Age, Life is a Dreammay be displaced to Poland - which must have struck its audience as a location no less exotic than the moon - but it reflects Spain at a crucial juncture, coinciding with the country's political hegemony in Europe and its incipient decline. Clifford is reluctant to identify a clear message within the play, which still seems as diaphanous and open to interpretation as a dream, but says: "There's no reason for taking something out of the past unless it has meaning for the present."

She continues: "What we have to do in theatre is create something poetic that actually tells us what's going on beneath the surface of things. What's amazing about this play is that it touches on our terror of that moment when the whole state starts to fall apart. We're living through that now. We have to find alternatives. It's the artist's job to find ways the world can move forward."

In other words, artists have to dream alternative worlds into being. That may strike you as a tall order, were it not for Clifford's belief in the transformative powers of theatre and her own ongoing journey.

"It's what I'm living through," she agrees. "It's very strange. On the plane coming here today, ordering a drink, the stewardess said: 'Yes, a gin and tonic for this lady.' And I thought, 'oh my god, that's me'. You never get to the end of this sort of thing. None of us can. The process of self-discovery is infinite.

"We're far richer and deeper and far more interesting that we normally give ourselves credit for."

Rough Magic's production ofLife is a Dream , by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, translated by Jo Clifford, opens in Dublin's Project Arts Centre on Monday and runs until April 19.