Arabian Nights is a two-part 2000 miniseries, adapted by Peter Barnes from Sir Richard Francis Burton's translation of the medieval epic One Thousand and One Nights and directed by Steve Barron. It was produced by Hallmark Entertainment and originally broadcast over two nights on 30 April and 1 May 2000 on BBC One in the United Kingdom and ABC in the United States.
The series consists of five stories from One Thousand and One Nights, which are framed within a sixth, maintaining the traditional style of stories within stories that is synonymous with the Nights. The series cast includes John Leguizamo, Jason Scott Lee, Rufus Sewell, Mili Avital and Dougray Scott.
Contents
Synopsis
Frame story
The series starts in Baghdad at an undetermined time. Shahryar, Sultan of Baghdad, has gone mad after accidentally killing his treacherous wife five years earlier during a failed coup d'état, which his wife had planned with her secret lover, Shahryar's brother Schahzenan. In his madness, Shahryar now believes that all women want to kill him, but the law states that the Sultan must be married again or the throne will be passed to his brother. Shahryar has therefore ordered his Grand Vizier Ja'Far to bring him one of his concubines from the harem to marry and then have executed the next morning.
In order to prevent this, the Grand Vizier's clever daughter Scheherazade decides to marry the Sultan herself; Scheherazade (a childhood friend of the Sultan who has secretly fallen in love with him since then) formulates a plan to prevent her execution, and at the same time cure the Sultan of his madness. With the help of some tutoring from a bazaar storyteller, Scheherazade (an already-avid lover of stories and of the lessons they can teach) tells the Sultan a story every night, stopping at dawn with a cliffhanger, and then refusing to continue until dusk. Shahryar must therefore let Scheherazade live for another day in order to hear the rest of the story. Cunningly, Scheherazade has hidden a moral within every story, to help coax the Sultan out of his madness.
Meanwhile, Schahzenan learns about the Sultan's madness and that he is unable to execute his new wife. Perceiving this as weakness, Schahzenan decides to lead his army to Baghdad in an attempt to take the throne by force. However, by the time Schahzenan's army reaches the city, Scheherazade's plan has worked. As a result of her stories, Shahryar has overcome his madness and has fallen in love with Scheherazade. Using strategies inspired from elements from the stories, Shahryar is able to defeat his brother's army.
At the end of the battle, it is revealed that all that had been seen was a story itself, recounted by Scheherazade to her children. The series ends with Scheherazade promising to tell her children another story tomorrow night.
Scheherazade's stories
The first story told by Scheherazade is that of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Ali Baba is a poor peasant from Damascus who finds a magical cave where the loot is stolen by the Forty Thieves, a tribe of murderous bandits that have plagued the kingdom. Using the magic words "Open Sesame!", Ali enters the cave and takes the treasure. When Ali tells his brother Cassim about the cave, Cassim demands his own share and goes to the cave himself where he is discovered and killed by the leader of the Forty Thieves, the infamous Black Coda.
Ali Baba finds Cassim's body hung-up by the Forty Thieves as a warning to others. With the help of his newly hired servant, Morgiana, Ali takes down the body and gives Cassim a lavish funeral. This alerts Black Coda and the Forty Thieves to the fact that Cassim was not alone in taking their treasure.
Black Coda discovers that Ali Baba and Morgiana are living in a lubricious estate in Damascus and devises a plan to kill all in the household. The Forty Thieves enter the city hidden in oil barrels which are placed outside Ali's estate where they wait for nightfall. Before they can strike, Morgiana discovers the barrels and rolls them down to the bottom of a hill where the dazed Forty Thieves are arrested (and later hanged) by the city guards, although Black Coda escapes.
To celebrate their victory, Ali Baba hosts a feast. Morgiana performs an exotic dance for Ali Baba during which she stabs one of the guests, killing him. She removes the man's false beard, revealing him to be Black Coda. Awed by her loyalty, Ali Baba marries Morgiana.
Faisal, a tailor from Constantinople, designs Morgiana's wedding dress and attends the wedding with his wife Safil. Back in Constantinople, the couple have dinner with Bac-Bac, the Sultan's hunchbacked jester, during which Bac-Bac chokes on a fishbone and dies. Knowing that he was a favorite of the Sultan, they leave the body on the doorstep of a Jewish physician, Ezra Ben Ezra. Ezra trips over the body in the dark, falls down the stairs and assumes that he killed Bac-Bac in the fall. He drops the body down the chimney of a Chinese neighbor, Hi-Ching. Hi-Ching mistakes the body for a robber, attacks it with Kung Fu and believes that he killed Bac-Bac. He throws the body at a passing drunken Englishman, Jerome, who thinks he is being attacked and beats the body while calling for guards. The guards arrest Jerome for murder.
Cast
Mili Avital as Scheherazade
Dougray Scott as Shahryar and Amin the Beggar
Alan Bates as The Storyteller
James Frain as Schahzenan and Sultan Haroun Abraschild (character based on the historical Caliph Harun al-Rashid)
Peter Guinness as The Chief Executioner
Jason Scott Lee as Aladdin
Pik-Sen Lim as Aladdin's Mother
John Leguizamo as The Genie of the Lamp and The Genie of the Ring
Vanessa-Mae as Princess Zubaïda
Hugh Quarshie as Mustappa
Jim Carter as Ja'Far
Amira Casar as Morgiana
Rufus Sewell as Ali Baba
Tchéky Karyo as Black Coda
Andy Serkis as Kasim
Alexis Conran as Prince Ali
James Callis as Prince Ahmed
Hari Dhillon as Prince Hussain
Alexei Sayle as BacBac
Ayesha Dharker as Coral Lips
John Hallam as Demon
Jamila Massey as Safil
Filming
Locations
Arabian Nights was filmed on location in Turkey and Morocco and at Antalya Film Studios, Turkey.
Critical reception
Variety wrote "Lush, lavish and longer than necessary, ABC’s “Arabian Nights” is definitely an appealing spectacle but overly sluggish in too many places"; whereas TV Guide wrote "Gracefully directed and lavishly mounted, this delicious adaptation bears the earmarks of a sturdy classic."