The action, though still set in 1640, simultaneously takes place anytime and now. There is nothing historical or animatronic in Lloyd’s production. As their friends and followers and even their enemies melt into an indistinguishable mass of ribbons, watching the play usually feels like a historical pageant, or a three-hour animatronic exhibition at Versailles.
Roxane, trapped in her farthingales, has no sex or agency Christian no emotion save what Cyrano provides.
The arch verse no less than the ruffs and pantaloons too often turn Cyrano into a preening fop, which is exactly what he isn’t. Another is that new words reveal new people.īut in none of the many versions I’ve seen, even the good ones, has the story seemed alive or its characters fully human. Is there ever! Which is but one of the reasons this production, superbly directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring James McAvoy in an almost literally ravishing performance, is a triumph. It’s also a world in which, as the baker Ragueneau (now a poet, too) predicts, “There’s going to be a new force of words.” This is not your grand-mère’s “Cyrano.” Replacing Rostand’s stately 12-syllable alexandrines with jumpier rhythms, its euphemisms with plain speech and its perfect rhymes with ones so slant they serve as italics, Crimp rockets the action to a world drunk on language as it’s actually spoken. “They say when he came through his mother’s vagina/the nose poked out first as a painful reminder.” Cyrano is now introduced rather differently:
“Ah, good my lords, what a nose is his! When one sees it, one is fain to cry aloud, ‘Nay! ’tis too much!’”Īt any rate, one is fain to cry - because that’s unfortunately how the title character of “Cyrano de Bergerac” is usually introduced, both in the play’s first English translation, a year after its 1897 Paris premiere, and more or less ever since.īut in the version that opened at the BAM Harvey Theater on Thursday, “freely adapted” by Martin Crimp - so freely it almost amounts to a new play - the flowery phrases and antique diction of Edmond Rostand’s Belle Époque verse drama, at least as typically rendered in English, are finally fully swept away.
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