“Cyrano de Bergerac” at Playhouse Theatre
John Russell Taylor in the West End
2 April 2020
I suppose we all have our own particular bêtes noires among the standard classics. I remember Michael Levey, then director of the National Gallery, confessing to me that he really didn’t like Rembrandt. My own blind spot, if you like to put it that way, has always been Don Quixote. I could never see why anyone should care in any way about the boring follies of a mad old man. And yes, I have read it all, and no adaptation, whether by Orson Welles, Grigori Kozintsev, or Rudolf Nureyev, has changed my mind one iota.
I don ’t feel quite so strongly about Edmond Rostand’s 1897 historical drama Cyrano de Bergerac, but I must admit that it has never been exactly one of my favourite plays. However, I was able to go to this new production with quite an open mind. For one thing, I never voluntarily exclude myself from a possible source of enjoyment. Maybe this makes me sound like the last person who ought to be reviewing Cyrano. But as it turns out the opposite is probably the case. I hesitate to think how someone who really loved Rostand’s play as normally presented would react to Martin Crimp’s new version of the text, let alone what director Jamie Lloyd has made of it.
Me? Of course, I loved it. Where to start? The original play is in stately French couplets. Couplets of any sort tend to sound odd on the English stage. Nevertheless, Crimp’s version is still in verse. Sort of. Taking his cue from the presence of rival poets in the cast, he has turned Rostand’s text, what of it remains, into the declamations of rap competitors. And my dear, the language! Practically every serious swear word you ever heard crops up several times. Also the text has been manipulated here and there to bring in sly references to Brexit, immigration, the Me Too culture, radical feminism, cultural appropriation, and other very twenty-first-century preoccupations.
Well, why not, though we are provided with seventeenth-century dates, since all the costumes and the sparse visual references of the almost non-existent settings are firmly of our own time. All of this seems to me just what the tired old play needed. I am reminded of Stephen Daldry’s radical reinterpretation of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, or, further back, the RSC’s dramatized reading of Nicholas Nickleby. Lloyd’s hip-hop, microphone-using version of Cyrano is more iconoclastic with the text, but in general the idea of stripping everything back is similar, and it likewise successfully reboots the piece for the very different world of today.
In this, Lloyd is aided enormously by the brilliant, diverse cast he has assembled. Totally colour blind, and with more than a hint of gender neutrality as well, the production makes its political correctness into an aesthetic asset. Pride of place must inevitably be given to James McAvoy’s passionate, physical performance as Cyrano. While he is sedulously not presented as a star turn, Rostand had put him centre stage throughout, and that’s what he has to say. But anyway, McAvoy is dazzling, whether shifting accent to take Christian’s place and to remind us that sometimes a pretty face is just a pretty face or movingly reclaiming his true rights when on the point of death.
All the same, Eben Figueiredo as Christian, a bit of a cypher in Rostand’s original, does here manage to impart some depth to the character, and even make him at moments quite touching. The same goes for Anita-Joy Uwajeh as Roxane. Usually the character seems slightly doltish and nothing more; here she becomes a feisty woman who wants to be wooed with poetry, more than able to hold her own in a society of unquestioningly macho men. And Michele Austin as Lela, mistress of ceremonies, holds the centre stage when it is her due with irresistible authority.
Oh yes, I probably ought to mention that, for all that McAvoy’s Cyrano has going for it, and despite a number of references in the text, he does not have a nose any longer than usual. Political correctness? It’s wrong to mock the afflicted? I don’t know. And does it matter? Well, I noticed for the first five minutes, then forgot all about it. In any case we can imagine the proboscis better than any make-up artist could build it, so why not leave it to our imaginations? Rostand traditionalists may be alarmed at what they see (or don’t see), but the rest of us will just sit back and enjoy this entertaining start to the Jamie Lloyd Company’s nine-month season at the Playhouse Theatre.
