Don Quixote! Don Quixote!

It must be tempting when adapting a surreal work of fiction into a piece of physical theatre to indulge in the wackier themes of the text at the expense of coherence. Unfortunately Panta Rei's version of Cervantes's 17th century novel seems to have fallen victim to this trap.

Here Don Quixote is a deluded and anxious man—who only speaks Spanish—wandering a never-defined landscape in search of his lost sweetheart, Dulcinea, and his lost horse. Soon he wanders bizarrely into Hamlet, or more specifically into a pair of Hamletian gravediggers confused about life and death. The plot ambles from scene to scene without making much sense. Without any attempt to root the delusions of Quixote in solid reality we are left unable to grasp hold of any kind of story.

To give Panta Rei due credit it creates some beautiful images on stage, some haunting, some comic: wooden spoons used as droopy donkey ears; a sensual sequence where Don Quixote hallucinates visions of Dulcinea, diaphanous and surrounded by umbrellas draped in silk; or the subtle transformation of weightless bubbles to hard marbles. But whenever meaningful, quality drama promises to emerge—such as Sancho confronting Quixote about his delusions—the gravediggers reappear like experimental theatre despots bellowing cod philosophy or dancing around with saucepans on their heads.

The company has produced the piece as part of a collaborative project with an institute of psychiatry, and while exploring mental illness through theatre is to be commended, this incoherent patchwork of scenarios doesn't have much to report back.