About this Production
This script marks Lemonhead Productions’ second stage production and its first work performed in Maltese. Staged in December 2001, the play reimagines the spirit of Don Quixote within a contemporary Maltese village setting, replacing the landscapes of Cervantes’ Spain with the familiar rhythms, gossip, humour, faith, suspicion, and everyday tensions of local community life.
At its centre is Alonso, a modern Maltese counterpart to Don Quixote: a man whose imagination, learning, ideals, and frustrations make him see the ordinary world through a heroic and sometimes dangerous lens. Public events, village processions, books, parish politics, neighbourhood conversations, and local characters become the raw material for his private quest. Instead of windmills, he confronts the symbols and habits of the society around him; instead of distant chivalric adventures, his battles erupt in the square, at home, in the grocer’s, outside the church, and among the people who think they know him.
The adaptation brings the Don Quixote idea into a recognisably Maltese and late-2001 world by grounding the story in local speech, village relationships, domestic obligations, religious authority, small-town rumour, parish life, and generational conflict. Alonso’s idealism clashes with a practical, talkative, sometimes intrusive community, while characters such as Juanita, Yvonne, Rosita, Dun Indri, Fr Paul, Philip, Lourdes, Marija, Therese, Bertu, and the others give the piece its distinctly Maltese voice. Through comedy and satire, the play explores how fantasy, faith, literature, ageing, loneliness, social control, and the hunger for meaning can collide in a modern island community.
Credits: Written by Adrian Scerri. Directed by Bryan Muscat. Produced by Louise Muscat and Bryan Muscat.
