Drinking with Don Quixote.

At The New Continental, South Meadow Lane, Preston. 7.30pm Wednesday 27th and Thursday 28th October 2010.

Audience feedback:

"I don't feel I put across just how incredibly

 good the show was the other night.

It was utterly hilarious, vitally modern and

 deeply moving."

"Excellent: the best money you will

 spend this month."

"Absolutely loved Drinking with Don Q last

 night! It was great fun and fabulously

 entertaining!!"

 

"Brilliant! every moment of madness was

 just genius and such a marvelous cast!"

"I'm having trouble

getting some of the tunes

out of my head. I had a great night."

 

"Not laughed so much for longer than I can

 remember."

"It was absolutely brilliant."

"Very, very funny."

"I'd never have believed that a plunger

and colander could be used

in such inventive ways!"

"Drinking with Don Quixote was a

 triumph."

Regarded by many as the first modern  novel,  The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha was published in 1605. So popular was this volume that a sequel appeared in 1613 just three years prior to the death of its author Miguel de Cervantes.  Both parts were subsequently published as a single work. The novel was recently voted The Greatest Book of All Time by the Nobel Institute.

Cervantes, the son of a poor Spanish surgeon had a colourful and mostly very difficult life.  He served as a soldier, was captured by pirates and taken to be a slave in Algiers where he remained for five years until he was ransomed and returned home to Spain, where he subsequently spent two periods in prison.  He died on the same date as Shakespeare 23^rd April 1616.

The book tells of Alonso Quixano, a retired 50 year old country gentleman who has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes their every word to be true, despite the fact that many of the events in them are clearly impossible.  Quixano regarded by his friends as unbalanced, adopts the mantle of a chivalrous knight errant and goes out in search of adventure.  His exploits are notoriously ridiculous.  His most famous encounter is one in which he attacks windmills that he has mistaken for giants.

The novel is over 1000 pages in length so cutting this down to less than two hours of drama was no mean feat.  Whilst Drinking with Don Quixote retains the essential absurd spirit of the original, it removes the action by one further step, relocating the central character to contemporary northern England but retaining the Spanish atmosphere via music and dance. 

The uneasy play tells the story of a man who thinks he is the man who thought he was Don Quixote.  In his head he is in medieval Spain, in reality he is in twenty-first century Lancashire.

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