“Cyrano”, Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Traverse Theatre
To 25 August. (Times vary)
Venue 15
Duration: 80 minutes
Jeremy Malies in Edinburgh
12 August 2024
**** Four-star review
No huge nose but it’s queered and there is much discussion of huge dicks. This gender-flipped rewrite of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 Cyrano de Bergerac by Australian Virginia Gay extends the original’s opening scene set in a theatre to have a group of Pirandellian characters comment on the action. The bystanders even evaluate themselves as written creations. (The Melbourne debut of this version had them as actors trying to find their feet on stage again after a layoff due to Covid.)
Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic.
Gay stars as Cyrano with direction by Clare Watson. She is not a soldier but a stand-up comedian (it goes with the vibe here I suppose) who begins with a flurry of jokes. “Cyrano was late but her nose was on time!” She has no disfiguring feature in terms of how she is presented physically. A huge schnoz is passé; the audience imagines the disfigurement these days just as we did with Jamie Lloyd’s version starring James McAvoy.
The essence of the plot is simple. Yan (played by Brandon Grace) is a tongue-tied, good looking and brash but essentially decent soldier who wants Roxanne played by Jessica Whitehurst. Knowing that Roxanne is hedonistic and cerebral in equal parts, Yan asks the poetic Cyrano to woo her for him not by proxy but as a deception while standing at Yan’s shoulder. (Gay has talked in interviews about the modern social network crime of catfishing.) Yan and Roxanne have sex, but the tortured Cyrano knows that she is a player in all this: “She doesn’t want you. She’s fucking herself with my words!”
Distorting mirrors cleverly underline that this is a play in which you can never be quite sure who is who. After their coupling, Roxanne reflects: “It’s like he [Yan] is two different people!” Whitehurst shows her first-rate technique as her cogs whir while reflecting that Cyrano has mentioned something she told only to Yan. Music by Kehlani stuck with me, throwing up contrasts between the singer’s warm vocals and the sparse instrumentation around them. Later we get a blast from producer-turned-singer Fred Again.
Gay might be dazzling and verbally luminous, but Whitehurst matches her in an early sequence that sees the women trying to outdo each other with signature quotes from great plays. I caught only (it’s super-apt being gender-flipped and involving wooing by proxy) Viola talking to Olivia in Twelfth Night about “loyal cantons of contemned love”. Not everything is as deft as this; a pantomime-style pun on “platitudes” and “platypus” momentarily derailed the wonderful exchanges.
There is no skipping forward 15 years here and things turn out well. It’s a happy ending; Yan puns on this phrase crudely, and he too finds a partner in recent Bristol Old Vic product Tanvi Virmani (outstanding) who plays one of the unnamed metatheatrical adjuncts.
The main couple snog on the apron of the stage with Cyrano telling Roxanne that she wants to travel to Amsterdam with her in order to kiss her on the neck among the Rembrandts. Hmm! It should be stressed that Gay is never presented as androgynous here; she is played at all times as a woman (even in this martial society) and her character wins out by tapping into another element of Roxanne’s sexual orientation.
At first, I was wary of characters repeatedly telling each other what happens “in the original” as they reflect on what is missing and what (a tale of a trip to the moon for instance) survives from the text as written. But looking at the youthful audience, I thought that because there is an original, a young writer might be prompted to adapt it radically just as Gay has done. He or she might make the trio all men or take it back to ancient Greece or set it on the moon. None of this would be a bad thing; the original will still be there. And for now, we have a joyous, intelligent and lucid version of a classic that has been my highlight in the city across both festivals.
