We all think we know the story of Don Quixote, the unexceptional man who imagines himself a knight and goes on to battle with windmills. But I, at least, had no idea what brought him to that point, or how his tale eventually ended. This gentle, playful show fills us in on the essentials of Cervantes’ plot, merging Inés Álvarez Villa’s storytelling with a flamenco soundtrack performed live on stage.

The storytelling is homely in style, delivered with a constant smile and warmth to match its setting on the sun-seared Spanish plains. There’s intrinsic humour in the scenes it describes and in Don Quixote’s very different reading of them, with some well-chosen turns of phrase adding to the gentle comedy. Yet there’s also respect and compassion for Don Quixote – who does perform some genuine acts of chivalry and, despite the ridicule that often surrounds him, retains the loyalty of his friends.

The story is accompanied throughout by flamenco guitar music, played live on the day I attended by Javier Mellado. It’s all too easy to treat the music as a gently evocative background, but if you tune into it properly you’ll realise it’s actually much more. It synchronises subtly but beautifully with the narrative, echoing the beat of galloping horse-hooves or the thrust of imagined battle. It’s difficult to conjure the essence of Spain inside a black-box theatre, but the combination of story and strumming truly did take me there.

Just occasionally – during that famed windmill encounter, for example – Álvarez Villa’s presentation grows more dynamic, incorporating expansive gestures and some movement around the stage. I’d have enjoyed a little more of that, to punctuate the narrative and focus each scene. There were also, I’m afraid, a few words I simply didn’t catch, perhaps because the balance of sound skewed too heavily towards the guitar.

But that doesn’t detract from the story’s wondrous spirit, nor the lessons it holds about both good and bad in human nature. The novel famously runs to a thousand pages… but Álvarez Villa gently shapes it into a compact and meaningful hour.