One Thousand and One Nights is a night too long

In the Luminato Festival's most ambitious commission yet, British director Tim Supple has compressed the collection of Arabic stories known as One Thousand and One Nights into two trilingual nights of three hours each.

It's an impressive and often exciting undertaking, but one night of Middle Eastern folk tales proves enough. Catch the first part; skip the second.

One Thousand and One Nights - which came into English-speaking culture in the 1700s under the title Arabian Nights - is a single story that branches out into other stories of fishermen and princes and jinn (genies) that then branch out into countless more stories.

The trunk of this tree of tales is the famous fable of Scheherazade (Houda Echouafni), though the details in Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh's adaptation are darker and more sexually shady than you might recall from children's books.

After catching his wife engaged in an orgy with her slaves, King Shahryar (a regal and menacing Assaad Bouab) loses all trust in womankind. His murderous reaction is to marry a virgin every night, then send her to be killed in the morning, so he will never be betrayed again.

Scheherazade, daughter of the king's vizier, eventually offers herself up to save other women and hatches a plot to survive. With her sister in tow, she lights up a story every night after sex but always leaves it to be continued. The king gets hooked and lets her live another night, then another night, then at least 999 more.

The first of Scheherazade's stories is another framing tale: The Porter and the Three Ladies, in which the title characters, three one-eyed dervishes and three merchants holed up in a mysterious mansion for the night. Here, the narrator's situation is dramatically reversed: The three women force the men to tell their stories if they wish to leave alive. (Ramzi Choukair, as the lucky, lustful porter, is a stand-out here and as Sinbad the Sailor in the second part.)

Themes of jealousy and sexual violence permeate Supple and al-Shaykh's story selections, with women characters generally getting the short end of the stick. A fickle young man leaves his cousin dying of a broken heart, while a prince cowardly leaves his lover to die at the hands of a jinn whose wrath he has aroused.

Other men hurt the women they purport to love more directly: Suspecting her of adultery, a carpet merchant chops up his wife, wraps her body parts in a rug and dumps her in the Tigris. (That's as close as we get to magical flying carpets in this version - friendly faces from Western adaptations such as Aladdin and Ali Baba are also entirely absent.)

In the first, three-hour part, Supple fluidly moves the action from one frame to another, manages to keep a sense of through-line and balances darker elements with light comedy very well. The episode in which a Jewish doctor, a Muslim chef and a Christian trader try to make the king of China laugh in order to save their hides is amusing, a comic inversion of Scheherazade's storytelling survival.

In the second part, however, Supple's production is less surely crafted and gets bogged down in a tiresome debate about whether men or women are more treacherous. Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad's recent sprawling tree of stories Forests seems a model of narrative concision compared to these One Thousand and One Nights.

Indeed, Supple's uneven, but largely skilled cross-cultural cast includes veterans of Mouawad's work and that of Ariane Mnouchkine's famed Théâtre du Soleil. They tend to perform more fluently - and comprehensibly - in Arabic and French, which is translated into English on a series of screens positioned around the specially constructed thrust stage (smartly designed by Oum Keltoum Belkassi.)

What's missing, especially after the first part, is a sense of the urgency driving the storytelling. By the middle of the second half, Supple has seemingly forgotten Scheherazade's plight and, frustratingly for those who bothered to get invested in it, an alternate version of King Shahryar's tale is told and Scheherazade becomes a character in one of her character's stories. Consistency is sacrificed for a cheap meta-theatrical ending.

There's a real appetite for sprawling, marathon productions on the international festival circuit these days - but not everything needs to be theatrically told over six hours. Supple might learn from Scheherazade the art of leaving the audience wanting more and cut this down to a single four hours.

One Thousand and One Nights