The Penny Dreadfuls Present...

A meditation on the age of chivalry, insanity and truth. A quest of windmills, magic and donkeys. Join peasant Sancho and the man who thinks he's a Knight as they travel together locked together in a quest to save those who don't want saving and unravel enchantments which may or may not only exist in their minds. Sylvester McCoy plays the lead.

"Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind." (Cervantes, Don Quixote)

The Penny Dreadfuls Present: Don Quixote

Join sketch trio The Penny Dreadfuls for their latest comedy play to be performed in the legendary BBC Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House.

Published in two volumes in the early 17th century, Cervantes' Spanish classic Don Quixote is famous as the world's first modern novel, a ground-breaking piece of art that influenced countless generations of writers as much as his contemporary Shakespeare and at 800 pages of dense prose, one of the most unreadable novels ever.

Writer David Reed has read it so that you don't have to and condensed this mighty tome into an hour's rip-roaring entertainment. A meditation on the age of chivalry, insanity and truth. A quest of windmills, magic and donkeys. Join peasant Sancho and the man who thinks he's a Knight as they travel together locked together in a quest to save those who don't want saving and unravel enchantments which may or may not only exist in their minds.

This is the eighth hour-long comedy by The Penny Dreadfuls for BBC Radio 4, who specialise in taking iconic historical figures or events and turning them into gripping laugh-out-loud adventures. Past dramas have taken in Guy Fawkes, The French Revolution, Hereward The Wake, Macbeth, Homer's Odyssey, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and John Le Carre's 1960s Berlin.

The Penny Dreadfuls are Humphrey Ker (tall), David Reed (medium) and Thom Tuck (drunk). They will be joined as ever by honorary Dreadful Margaret Cabourn-Smith plus three guest stars including Vivienne Acheampong. Not to be missed!