So what are the big ideas that come across? One is the infinite complexity of male-female relations in the Muslim world. Initially, it seems as if women are always there to be punished. The whole saga starts when a king, Shahryar, decides to take revenge on the female sex after catching his wife in an orgy: something vividly realized in Supple’s production with much caressing of prop phalluses and choreographed rutting. 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 conflict between punitive men and resourceful women is one that runs through the whole saga. In the second, more urgently gripping half we hear the stories of five sisters who have been viciously wronged by men: one has been scarred for life for allowing a lecherous shopkeeper to bite her cheek. But what is fascinating is how the women fight back. When the caliph admits wrongs have been done and tries to fix the women up with husbands, they say: “We regard men as a deadly disease.” And, even if not everyone goes that far, you sense that women survive in this world only by living on their wits: in the funniest story, a woman overcomes five, grasping would-be lovers by stripping them of their clothes and stacking them in cages as if they were guinea-pigs.

If any other great idea emerges from the day, it is the fallibility of power. A husband executes his wife on the flimsiest evidence of infidelity, and corruption invades the highest places so that rulers use authority for sexual advantage. But there is a healing wisdom to these stories that tell us “loyalty is good, treachery is evil”. At first, he takes her in an act of brutal sex tantamount to marital rape. By the end of the saga, he sits spellbound by her stories as they live in seeming harmony. In the sense that we have accompanied the performers on a long journey, this piece of narrative theater acquires dramatic power.