The New Adventures of Don Quixote

Tariq Ali

Wth photographs by Arko Datto

 

6 x 7.5 inches, 200pp, 30 colour plates. February 2015

ISBN : 9780857422095

Rs  695.00 (HB)
$21.00 (HB)
£30.00 (HB)

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Tariq Ali’s latest play, The New Adventures of Don Quixote, can be read as an homage to German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht as much as a playful tribute to Cervantes’s masterwork. The central characters from the original novel, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, are mounted on their beasts of burden, Rocinante and the Mule, and Ali has them ride into the twenty-first century, where they are confronted by old, familiar vices: war, greed, ethnic and religious prejudices, disappointed love, and economic crisis. Amid the satirical and sad songs, there are odd moments of happiness for Quixote, when he imagines that a wounded US colonel is Dulcinea and allows himself to be seduced by her in a military hospital in Germany.

 

Primarily interested in discovering the meaning of life and how it is molded by the world in which we live, Ali uses the theatrical device of the conversation between the two animals—Rocinante the philosopher and Mule the everyman who questions her relentlessly. Accompanied by full-colour stills from the play\'s production in Germany, this volume is as intellectually stimulating as it is uproariously humorous.

Tariq Ali is a writer, critic and film-maker. He has written over a dozen books on world history and politics as well as scripts for both stage and screen. The first novel of his Islam Quartet, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, has been translated into several languages and was awarded the Archbishop San Clemente del Instituto Rosalia de Castro Prize for the best foreign language fiction published in Spain in 1994. The third, The Stone Woman was published by Verso in 2000.

 

Theatre And Performance Studies
Playscript