Richard meets Saladin – plus all the best Arabian Nights gags in one corking script!
Are you a sucker for the mysterious orient? Dashing bandits and svelte houris, idyllic oases and teeming souks, hawk-faced magicians, desert-defying caravans, corrupt Grand Viziers, gorgeous palaces, and Ray Harryhausen special effects? The Arabian Knights is an eastern concoction into which every conceivable Arabian Nights cliché has been stirred, seasoned with a tiny twist of alternative history, and cunningly bound together in a traditional pantomime recipe, featuring lots of familiar ingredients. Not forgetting several opportunities to add a dash of local flavour to your production.
As part of his fiendish plot to defeat Richard the Lionheart, the evil Saladinsends his henchmen on a magic carpet to Merrie England, to abduct Richard’s Sweetheart, Thomasina. But Saladin’s bungling agents, Oshgoshand Babu, return instead with Thomasina’s irrepressible auntie, Dame Dollop -who quickly proves that the wicked Caliph has bitten off rather more than he can chew.
Thomasina meanwhile, travelling to join King Richard’s Crusade, encounters the dashing brigand, Hasan the Bandit. Hasan, who is not quite what he seems, is no friend to Saladin, and together with Thomasina, sets out to rescue Auntie!
With the help of an assortment of genies, assassins, eunuchs, Turkish wrestlers, dancing girls and pantomime camels, Dame Dollop escapes from the harem to outwit Saladin, and allow Richard to recapture the holy city of Jerusalem, and all in time for Christmas Day!
A hilarious, original, and thoroughly entertaining pantomime, guaranteed to transport all involved to the land of the Arabian Nights.