This magical steed finally earns its spurs
Don Quixote Garrick Theatre
Chivalry isn’t dead – it’s alive and well and tilting at windmills on the Charing Cross Road. As warm as a July afternoon in Madrid, the RSC’S music-spruced adaptation of Cervantes’ sprawling early 17th-century comic masterpiece – and mighty cornerstone of Western literature – has finally clip-clopped its way into the West End, having first been seen in Stratford in March 2016.
David Threlfall remains in the saddle as the fond and foolish “hidalgo” so besotted with fables of chivalric adventure he sets himself up as a “knight errant”, roaming the land in search of giants to slay and damsels to rescue. The 65-year-old actor – best known as the roaring drunken patriarch of the Gallagher clan in Channel 4’s Bafta-winning comedy drama series Shameless – has really got his work cut out for him now, though.
First time round, Angus Jackson’s glorious production traded on the intimacy of the Swan. But the Garrick, charming, companionable playhouse though it is, has a greater seating capacity and the auditory demands of an end-on (rather than a thrust) stage.
The gauntness and frailty of Threlfall is part of what he brings to the role, points up the risible-pitiable disconnect between what Don Quixote (as Alonso Quixano dubs himself) aspires to achieve and prosaic reality.
Yet as he clanks about in rusty armour, groans under the weight of his sword and empties his lungs out in song like a gasping marathon-runner, you wonder whether this spectral figure has the stamina for a show that’s one madcap thing after another – for all the lively variety of James Fenton’s pacy version, a model of supercompression.
Initially, whenever Rufus Hound as the amiable, big-bellied Sancho Panza (roped into becoming Quixote’s attendant “squire”) comes on to confide his frustrations at the dullness of rustic life (and attendant wanderlust) and warm us up with the kind of ad-libs that are second nature to him as a stand-up, the impression is of the frantic collective pumping of a continually deflating tyre.
As Quixote mistakes a tavern for a castle, puts himself at the service of his imaginatively embellished mistress (“The Lady Dulcinea del Toboso”) and frets about needing a fardel, it’s as if we’re being asked to watch an elongated equivalent of King Lear’s delusional “trial” of his daughters. We must humour the ancient and indulge the bare-bones theatrics that convey the improvised nature of his carry-on; yet we can’t see the world through his eyes, can we?
Well, weirdly, the miracle that happened in Stratford happens again, amid this less forgiving (and more wallet-testing) West End environment. The persistence of Threlfall and co works its own rough magic.
Just as those closest to the madman of La Mancha gradually play along with his follies the better to protect him from himself, so we too suspend disbelief.
For all the modern knowingness that surrounds the action, at heart there’s a sincerity to Quixote’s grandiose mission and a dignity to its old-fashioned valour that fully enlists our sympathy.
When our chastened hero is finally raised from his death-bed on a harness, proudly saluting as he vanishes up heavenwards in an image worthy of Terry Gilliam (the evening abounds with a Python-esque mischief) – he has totally earned his spurs, made us care.
Hats (or perhaps sombreros) off to Threlfall, then, but also to the indefatigable Hound and the rest of the 18-strong cast, some of whose faces are so delectably anachronisticlooking they might almost have been borrowed from Old Master paintings nearby at the National Gallery.
Veteran West End producer Thelma Holt, 86, who has helped bring the show “in”, is angling for the family market as Christmas looms.
She’s not entirely suffering Quixotic delusions. It will appeal to children of a precocious disposition as surely as it woos grown-ups with vital residual traces of childish wonderment.