Review: Don Quixote (is a Very Big Book), Pleasance Dome

Dik Downey’s puppets are a masterpiece of design. Every single one is a beautiful sculpture that draws the eye, often revealing an unexpected, delightful component, like the tiny but perfectly formed sheep on the end of each finger of a glove. I could have watched Downey imbue his puppets with life for hours.

But this is not just a show about Don Quixote (the 17th-century novel about an elderly down-at-heel knight-errant full of romantic fantasies who wears a barber’s basin for a helmet), it is also the story of Downey’s own midlife crisis, a metatextual interweaving which is certainly in keeping with the original. Faced with a performing partner who has deserted him, Downey must perform alone, perhaps, he tells us, for the last time. Some of these explorations of legacy and mortality are poignant, such as when he struggles on the floor under the weight of his 17kg plate armour. His struggles kick up dust, rising eloquently through a tightly focused dim spotlight, as he tells us a story about a cabaret performer who died on stage, yet everyone thought it was part of the act. “I don’t want that to be me,” he says. 

At other times Downey’s humour takes a rather crass turn, focusing on the indignities of ageing – there’s quite a long soliloquy about anal health, for example – or his disappointing relationship with his former clown partner, about whom Downey tells a tale of rubbing his sore nipples with Vaseline. On multiple occasions. Much of the original book is in fact quite crass, a fact people often forget in their hazy reminiscence of a picaresque adventure story, which has something to do with windmills. Downey doesn’t shy away from an episode in which a boy is tied to a tree and beaten for losing a flock of sheep, or some of the other more nudge-nudge-wink-wink adult material from the text. This is perhaps rather unfortunate for a mid-afternoon puppet show which will largely draw an audience of children and parents. Jokes that in another audience might seem edgily transgressive here feel uncomfortably so, and the laughter becomes a bit strained. 

But even were this a late-night show, or more clearly advertised as approaching the material with a sly smirk rather than with bowdlerized “good clean fun” innocence, some of the material about Adam (the deserting co-performer) feels like a digression into a different show entirely: we can appreciate that Downey is doing an exquisite, deft job of the puppet work on his own without the embittered and resentful lamentations about this being a solo show.

Choosing to devise a show that requires wearing 17kg of plate armour for 23 straight performances is certainly a bold (some might say quixotic) move. This is certainly a show worth watching – but perhaps don’t listen too closely.

Performer, Puppets & Costumes: Dik Downeyn
Dramaturge/Director: Emma Williams
Composer:  Simon Preston 
Choreographer:  Aneta Skut
Rocinante Fabrication: Izzy Bristow
Production Manager & Sound Designer: Chris Collier
Producer: Ali Robertson

Don Quixote (is a Very Big Book) runs at the Pleasance Dome until Monday 31 August