Durfey's Don Quixote is a musical whose score is 300 years old. In a specially commissioned dramatisation of the work by Don Taylor, the original music of Eccles, Purcell and others is reconsidered in a fresh and illuminating version.
Other parts played by Derek Waring, Ian Masters and Jilly Bond.
Lucy Skeaping (soprano) Consort of Musicke
City Waites
Purcell Simfony

8.55 Interval
Michael Billington of The Guardian talks to playwright and director Don Taylor and to musical director Anthony Rooley about the genesis of this production.
Additional music by Blaise Compton
Director Don Taylor

Who says chivalry is dead? Roddy and Lucy Skeaping join Roy Hudd in the first full-scale musical production of Don Quixote since 1695. Some of the music, by Eccles, Purcell and others, has been heard in concert, but the work has never been performed in its rightful setting until now. The original rambling scripts of Thomas Durfey are not acceptable to modem audiences, but writer and director Don Taylor has gone back to Cervantes's masterpiece to create a witty framework of a play-within-a-play in which Purcell, Durfey and actor-manager Thomas Betterton struggle to get their show on stage. This evening's remarkable entertainment stars Paul Scofield as the errant knight. (See also The D-D-Drunken P-P-Poet, Radio 3 5.45pm.)