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.
Here Susannah Fielding’s Roxane is given agency and spirit: “Listen to MY story,” she says at one point, later accusing Cyrano of being “humiliating [and] controlling”. It becomes a tragedy for all of the central trio, not just Cyrano: even Levi Brown’s Christian can’t be loved for the simple, honest soul he is.
The only serious flaw is a certain bagginess and stateliness of pace. As I’ve banged on before, this is common to RSC shows that originate in Stratford-upon-Avon, where there’s nothing to do but go to the theatre, and a three-hour running time is seen as part of the full experience. Here at least, the slowness allows us to engage in a deeper relationship with the romantic central characters and gives space for some memorable comic sketches of the more minor ones.
It opens in a theatre, actors scurrying around the stage, stalls and circle, anxious that the famous Cyrano is going to disrupt the performance of an elderly blowhard thespian as Romeo. Lester’s showman-swordsman duly appears, attended by a sextet of minstrels he won in a bet, to vanquish both the actor and then a count’s henchman who insults his enormous conk. Lester gets the audience to repeat the slur – “it’s f***ing huge” – and we will periodically hereafter be enlisted as tavern denizens, army reservists or onlookers to the unfolding sadness.
Fielding’s vivacious Roxane, first seen in the theatre box, is a merry widow who’s just buried the husband she was compelled to marry. Her bodice and her choppy bob are cut to frame her elegant shoulders and laughing face. One of the many surprises that Evans and Stevenson spring is that when this idealised woman eventually speaks she is surprisingly earthy, almost vulgar. Christian, usually a himbo, is here a farm-boy looking for true love – “her hands in the soil beside mine” – who also knows the collective noun for all creatures. (This sounds pretentious but it’s utterly charming.)
Rostand’s play famously introduced the word “panache” to the English language and it’s impossible to avoid when considering Lester’s performance. There’s brio in his swordplay, verve in his iconoclastic disdain for the aristocracy represented by Scott Handy’s Comte de Guiche, crisp delight in his relish for words. With a shaven head and a goatee, he’s dashingly attractive, despite a prosthetic proboscis with a bulbous, penile tip. That, of course, is part of the point.
It’s not giving too much away to say that one of the most heartbreaking moments comes at the end when the wounded Cyrano becomes literally lost for words. Eloquence is both celebrated and interrogated here (words get between Roxane and Christian) and there are endless gorgeous lines.
Evans and designer Grace Smart match the verse with neat visual metaphors: Cyrano is haunted by his carefree younger self, brandishing a bullrush rapier; an acorn Christian gives to Roxane becomes a broken oak growing from a grave. The battle scenes are brutally effective. This very humane version of the story finds empathy even for the shifty de Guiche and gives Roxane’s sexually exuberant companion Abigal (Greer Dale-Foulkes) several comic moments in the sun.
At the end, two women in the row behind me were prostate with tears, unable to move. A bittersweet joy.
