Don Quixote

by James Fenton based on the novel by Miguel Cervantes

seen at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 4 April 2016

This new adaptation of the famous Spanish novel commemorates the quartercentenary of Cervantes's death (in the same month as Shakespeare's death). Director Angus Jackson has assembled an excellent ensemble cast led by David Threlfall as Don Quixote and Rufus Hound as his squire Sancho Panza. James Fenton's text, and his lyrics to the songs composed by Grant Olding, capture both the whimsical absurdity of the Don's obsession with chivalry, and the pathos of his response to the 'real' world as he constantly re-interprets it under the delusion that he is a knight-errant facing sorcery and evil.

Don Quixote sets off on his own at first, but takes an innkeeper's sarcastic remark that a proper knight should have a squire as a genuine reproof, and as an explanation for his first misfortune. So he returns to his village and co-opts Sancho Panza, whose name he cannot even remember properly, enticing him with the promise of an island to govern.

Sancho, by no means averse to humouring the knight so as to escape his overbearing wife, gradually shifts from amused impatience to a more sympathetic understanding of the Don's essential decency; but this is only one thread in a story that constantly maintains an extraordinary balance between mocking its subject and indulging it. 

The novel is long and episodic, even to the point of rambling. It is extolled as a great comedy, although when I read it many years ago, I did not laugh. The play has some fine comic scenes, including an accomplished warm-up of the audience by Rufus Hound as he establishes the situation and invites our collusion. Many of the adventures are ridiculous - the famous tilting at windmills, the adoption of a barber's shaving dish as a magical helmet, the lofty knight's service to the lady misapplied to a peasant girl. But the peculiar power of Don Quixote is to render these episodes both comic and serious at the same time; the Don can be both an object of ridicule and an object of pity - but perhaps the point is that he should not be seen as merely an object at all.

In the second half, in which a Duke and Duchess deliberately exploit both knight and squire for their own amusement, their entirely selfish attitude looks cruel, and is perhaps an uncomfortable reflection on our own easy readiness to unsympathetic laughter. But even here, we are dealing with more than one level of theatricality. The second part of the novel was written partly as a response to the publication of a piratical sequel to the first part, and Cervantes takes the opportunity to imagine that the first part has been read by many characters who appear in the second part. This is why the Duke and Duchess know about Don Quixote and why they decide to gull him.

While necessarily cutting many digressions and adventures, the play retains the essential features of the novel - the intriguing relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the stringing together of one episode after another, the plots by family and friends to confine the Don and deprive him of his books. Even the Don's at times wearisome explanations of all that is happening to him are reflected in the wordy conversations between knight and squire. 

Furthermore, the incongruity of the Don's adventures is wonderfully underlined by the behaviour of the animals he and Sancho ride - the dilapidated horse Rocinante and the sturdy donkey. These are played by members of the company, not with the breathtaking fluidity of the War Horse equine puppets, but rather with a resigned stoicism occasionally giving way to panic and rebellion. By a masterstroke, the point of the phrase 'members of the company' is that each time one of these animals appears, it is a different member of the cast who takes on the role. (In a post-performance discussion, Rufus Hound remarked that it was very late in the rehearsal process that the suggestion was made that these animals could comment on the action in this way, but that as soon as it was tried it became an essential part of the production.)

What the play has succeeded in doing is to maintain the atmosphere of the book - tolerant, amused, sympathetic and sardonic by turns, leaving each member of the audience to decide his or her own response. Some have found David Threlfall's remarkable performance to be too close to a portrayal of dementia for personal comfort, but this is not an interpretation that occurred to me while I was watching the play. It is a remarkably open ended work, totally eschewing the easy sentimentality of the musical Man of la Mancha which (doubtless for commercial reasons) had felt obliged to make something of Dulcinea in order to have a strong female lead. Here, quite properly, she is often referred to, but seen only once, and very briefly. The Don explains away her peasant appearance but expends no effort to disenchant her. He really is in a world of his own.