DON QUIXOTE
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Opened 3 March, 2016
****

William Shakespeare was not the only global literary figure who died in 1616. It therefore seems proper for the Royal Shakespeare Company to stage an adaptation of his exact contemporary’s magnum opus: Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

Cervantes’ great comic novel lends itself to imaginative staging. When the ageing Spanish protagonist becomes obsessed with published romances and comes to believe himself a chivalrous knight errant, his delusions run wild. Even those who have never seen, let alone opened, the book know the episode where he imagines windmills to be giants with flailing arms. Director Angus Jackson and designer Robert Innes Hopkins pull off the fantastical visuals with little set other than a few blocks and tackle and some trapdoors out of which huge, near-cutout windmills can be raised. They also cheekily make the knight’s horse and his squire Sancho Panza’s donkey out of wheelbarrow-like timber constructions that parody the puppets in War Horse.

As the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance himself, David Threlfall is all glittering eyes, extravagant white beard and two-foot waxed moustache, like a kestrel that has gone deep undercover. As the lazy, cowardly Sancho, Rufus Hound continues his admirable journey from stand-up comedian to skilled comic actor. Here he works the audience and the script alike, due in part to masterly guidance on both accounts. Adapter James Fenton has the literary awareness to catch both the comedy and, especially in the second half, the poignancy of Cervantes’s tale. He has also written sharp yet polished lyrics for a clutch of songs. (Fenton wrote the first version of the English libretto for Les Misérables.) And Jackson’s direction is bolstered by Cal McCrystal, credited as “comedy director” and deft at letting us see round the corners of the performance, as it were, and laugh at the staging as well as the material.

So much great storytelling is about stories themselves: what happens if we allow ourselves to be captured by them, but also how they are crucial to enriching our lives. Cervantes’ may be the first great work to address both these aspects at once, and the RSC production does profound, joyous justice to it.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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