Humour's a notoriously finicky thing: jokes that had seventeeth century Spanish courtiers snorting into their ruffs aren't guaranteed to get West End audiences rolling in the aisles. So the RSC’s staging of Cervantes’s 1615 novel does a very smart thing. Its knight errant Don Quixote, as played by ‘Shameless’ star David Threlfall, is very much the straight man, embarking on his po-faced quest to resurrect the age in chivalry in Spain. And comedian Rufus Hound, theoretically playing his squire/sidekick Sancho Panza, is there to step out of all the singing, dancing, flamenco-ing kitsch-ery and wink to a twenty-first century crowd that can't help but giggle along.
This vision of centuries-ago Spain is about as authentic as the Greek island in ‘Mamma Mia!’, and the plot twists it houses are just as ludicrous. I've never been sure if Don Quixote is terminally short-sighted or just so obsessed with medieval knights that he dreams a whole fantastical landscape into being. Either way, he mistakes herds of sheep for opposing armies, and windmills for giants waving their arms. And he sucks Sancho Panza into his myopic, deliriously weird world, even as everyone they encounter is baffled or tickled by their determination to stick by the values of chivalric honour and chastity.
Here, Hound is forever breaking out of the action to poke fun at a hapless audience member, or to goad the crowd into cheering or chuckling in all the right places. And director Angus Jackson deploys the kind of tricks that you're more likely to get in a panto than an RSC show. At one point, a crowd of livid villagers pelt the audience with buns. At another, Threlfall takes to the air in a worryingly-fragile exercise in stage flying.
His Quixote can never quite reach the heights of the great medieval knights of yore, but in a production this joyful, it's tremendously fun to watch him try.