Don Quixote is one of those characters we know we’re supposed to find hilarious. A larger-than-life figure of fun, his reputation precedes him, like Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

Four hundred years after it was published, Cervantes’s novel still tops polls of the world’s greatest fiction, though these lists are normally compiled by literary critics rather than the more numerous readers of popular fiction.

That general audience can find it difficult to understand the comic appeal of a Spanish fantasist and his adventures of imagined chivalry with his sidekick, Sancho Panza.

But Don Quixote did serve up the notion of “tilting at windmills”, a phrase that has inspired artists down the centuries.

Even today he inspires others to recklessness. Terry Gilliam would have made Europe’s most expensive film ever had his shoot for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote not been such a disaster and ground to a halt.

At the other end of the budgetary scale, Glasgow’s Theatre Modo has created a version of Don Quixote that delights in making something out of nothing.

Martin Danziger, the director, seeks a metaphor for the fantasy life of Quixote in the imaginative possibilities of theatre itself. The idea is to imagine Don Quixote as a modern computer-user inspired to aim for greater things by the possibilities of the digital world.

Danziger and his three actors use a minimal set of props and endlessly reinvent them. A computer terminal cleverly turns into Quixote’s steed — a couple of well-placed table lamps suggesting eyes and ears around the “nose” of the machine. To create a giant, they just need a ladder, a sheet and a well-placed bodhran.

Musically, the production is strong. Using a cello, acoustic guitar and percussion, the actors slide gracefully into Nick Underwood’s score, singing in close harmony.

But the modern-day setting creates two problems. The first is the lack of explanation for Robert Jack’s Donald taking on the persona of a knight errant. His decision to charge around in a motorbike helmet comes out of nowhere — but the reaction of Simon Donaldson as Sandy/Sancho Panza and Hannah McPake as Lucy/ Dulcinea suggests they think his behaviour is nothing more than an aberration.

It makes it all the more peculiar when a romance develops between Lucy and Donald. What could she see in a computer geek with a bad case of Dungeons & Dragons? The second problem is that by making Quixote a figment of Donald’s imagination, the story becomes uprooted. It never seems to be about how we can “imbue our lives with excitement and passion”, as Danziger intends, and is more about three young people larking around in their flat.

The result is like indoor fireworks — pretty, amusing, but the memory of the play fades fast.

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