The conflict between punitive men and resourceful women is one that runs through the whole saga. But Shahrayar's decision to slaughter a bride every day is famously countered by Shahrazad's ability to tell him a tale that keeps him on nightly tenterhooks: what you might call the ultimate cliff-hanger. The whole saga starts when a king, Shahrayar, decides to take revenge on the female sex after catching his wife in an orgy: something vividly realised in Supple's production with much caressing of prop phalluses and choreographed rutting. Intially, it seems as if women are always there to be punished. So what are the big ideas that come across? One is the infinite complexity of male-female relations in the Muslim world. By the end of the evening, I was totally converted. But gradually patterns emerge, the actors impose themselves on the material, and the elegant simplicity of Supple's production takes effect. One also briefly wonders what wisdom is to be gained from total immersion in what Borges called "the pulp fictions of the 13th century". At first, one is struck by the bombardment of narrative and the exhaustion of absorbing all the information that comes from the supertitles.
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