Adrian Lester is magnificent as the big-nosed, big-hearted soldier-bard in this witty and unbearably moving Royal Shakespeare Company revival of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 verse play. Director Simon Evans and writer Debris Stevenson, who is a poet as well as a playwright, academic and “professional raver”, embrace the theatricality of the drama and also warmly embrace the audience in way that’s light years away from the National’s current, self-consciously “meta” Misanthrope.
Their lyrical, music-laced adaptation cleverly but unobtrusively gives each major character a different poetic metre to speak. It also addresses and partially redresses the misogyny of the original, a story of two men deceiving a woman. Cyrano, believing himself ugly and unworthy of his childhood love Roxane, woos her on behalf of his handsome, tongue-tied comrade Christian.
