I’ve
said before that I’ve been meaning to do Quijote, on the stage, for a decade. It’s
a lie. It’s been more like a life-long obsession, with victories, regrets,
amazing highs and terrible lows and, behind it all, the terrible shadow of the Quijote curse everybody talks about.
From
an article on Terry Gilliam’s and Orson Welles’ failures:
“There is a curse that befalls those film
directors who try to adapt Don Quixote for the screen. Orson Welles, for one, began filming his version of the Cervantes epic
in 1957. When he died in 1985, it still wasn't finished, but in the intervening
time, the picture had become an obsession. The project was blighted by funding
crises that forced Welles to repeatedly stop filming and take on other
directing and acting jobs to earn money to restart filming. The project
outlived the man who originally played Quixote. After Welles's death, all that
was left to posterity was a series of tantalisingly beautiful scenes.”
And,
about the documentary of the unmaking of Quijote called Lost in La Mancha and Gilliam’s attempt to make a new Quijote film:
“If
I had a dime for every time Gilliam says ‘We're fucked!’ in the film, I might
be able to become a substantial backer for The
Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He says it regularly when some new problem
emerges - when he learns that love interest Vanessa Paradis's contract hasn't
been signed; when some extras haven't rehearsed a key scene; when the ailing
Rochefort takes 40 minutes to walk from his horse to his nearby car; when the
money men become unreasonable; when the props aren't right; when the might of
airborne Nato seems to be conspiring against him (…)There is also a Don Quixote made in 1957 by Grigori
Kozintsev, the sensitive Russian director of Hamlet and King Lear. ‘I heard
that version was plagued by problems,’ says Gilliam. ‘It's cursed, I tell you.’“
So
here I am, finally taking on this project whose subject seems to have a cosmic
pox on it. Why? Because I must. Why? Because I don’t do well with prophecies of
doom (unless, of course, I am the one who’s making them…)
I
really can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before (how long has it been since
the last Glissando post? A lifetime?),
but Noir, Glissando, and Quijote form a trilogy that spells Death, Love, and
Adventure, in other words, the three elements that sustain every story worth a damn.
There
were – there have always been – small, private ironies in my productions. This
trilogy is no exception. Noir, a play
about one man’s fascination with Death, was titled “A Love Story.” Glissando, a play about the complexities
of modern love, was advertised as “ The Art of Cruelty.” The Quijote play, which
embodies the century’s spirit of adventure, will bear the subtitle “The Death of
Conversation.” There are two reasons for this: one has to do with the
incredibly long time I’ve been waiting to stage the Quijote, which makes me think of Didi and Gogo’s conversations while waiting for Godot; the
other has to do with the insertion of a new character in the story of the
Ingenious Hidalgo in the form of Alice, whose impossibly clever conversations
with Humpty-Dumpty and the Knitting Sheep convinced me, a very long time ago,
that wit was dead in everyday exchanges. So: Quijote and Alice, madness and
absurdity, the proud dimensions of a world who looks at its refection in the
mirror and refuses to recognize itself. My character is not White-Rabbit Alice,
obviously (Eat me!), but its more dream-like, absurdist version, the Alice of
the Looking-Glass world, who plays a game of chess with the old Hidalgo and
wins. The last move on the chessboard spells Alice’s coronation as Queen, and
the quiet but tragic death of the Knight of the Sad Countenance. I think that,
for once, Dickens and I will have something in common, as I too will weep audibly
at the death of the only (fictional) man I've ever cared about.
Remember
the post where I confessed to my weakness which also happens to be my strength, and
the organizing principle of my plays? No? No matter. What I was saying was that, in all my plays, everybody gravitates toward one character who is
always a solitary, eccentric male figure, a Steppenwolf, a Desert Rat, a freak. In this respect, this
trilogy really affected me, perhaps more than any of my other plays, because I would have done anything to protect S. Night, the character in Noir; I felt both pity and hate for Tony Chehov,
the oblique character in Glissando; and I have always been in love, terminally
so, with Quijote. For me, he embodies everything: chivalry and romance, absurdity
and madness, fiction and reality, victory and failure. The Quest is everything.
Mine begins now.
