Cyrano de Bergerac Review: A Stripped-Down Tragicomedy of Verbal Acrobatics

By reducing the play’s grandeur to the scope of a lightly staged radio play, words become the principal protagonist.

Cyrano de Bergerac
Photo: Marc Brenner

Everyone adores Roxane—for her beauty, at first glance, but then for her ferocious intellect. Bandied about by the various buffoons who desire her, she remains frustrated by the mores of 1640s France that ensure her underappreciation: “I am so, so bored with not being taken seriously by men,” she sighs, but it’s clear how seriously she takes herself.

Played with glorious aliveness and vast emotional intelligence by Evelyn Miller, this Roxane is the crowning reason to see Jamie Lloyd’s inventive but sometimes stagnant reimagining of Cyrano de Bergerac, a transfer of a U.K. production that was originally scheduled to premiere at BAM in 2020. Lloyd, who directed a star-studded New York production of Betrayal in 2019, is no stranger to Edmond Rostand’s late 19th-century play, having staged a traditional translation in period dress on Broadway in 2012. This is not that.

Cyrano de Bergerac has been reimagined here as a poetry slam with Martin Crimp’s irreverent adaptation transforming the rhythms of Rostand’s French verse into contemporary spoken word. Cyrano’s famous opening verbal attack on the sneering aristocrat Valvert (Nari Blair-Mangat) proceeds with the pulsating venom of a diss track: “Look he’s just a poor little rich boy arsehole/Brought up in mummy and daddy’s family castle,” Cyrano’s verse cascades, the occasionally plebeian rhymes elevated in James McAvoy’s spitfire brogue.

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McAvoy, the Scottish actor perhaps best known for Atonement and the X-Men films, doesn’t don an enormous prosthetic nose to play Cyrano. A mirror at the back of the stage serves as a perpetual reminder that Cyrano is ever-conscious of the deformity that we’re asked here to imagine for ourselves; he’s crippled by his nose and the social humiliation that it represents.

That’s not the only part of this production that’s stripped down. Cyrano de Bergerac is peppered with Lloydisms recognizable from Betrayal. Amid a largely bare stage, chairs are the principal props (although mic stands and cords play a role here too). Eye contact is an intimacy reserved only for the most significant moments, and most lines are delivered straight out to the audience. Characters hover and drift throughout scenes in which they do not appear.

Betrayal conveyed the uncomfortable sense that Harold Pinter had been taken hostage by an aesthetic which did not much agree with him. And while Lloyd’s Cyrano de Bergerac cannot sustain its most electric energy for the nearly three-hour running time, Edmond Rostand’s tragicomedy of verbal acrobatics is a more natural fit for a minimalist style for one reason: It’s a play about language, about the ways we wield it and the truths we hide behind it.

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By reducing the play’s grandeur to the scope of a lightly staged radio play (even the sounds of war come from the mic of a beatboxer, Vaneeka Dadhria), words become the principal protagonist. Sometimes, especially when Crimp’s modern vocabulary strains in his attempts to generate direct translations of Rostand’s lengthy monologues, the simplicity gives way to sluggishness. Those unfamiliar with the play—and thus unable to imagine the scenes fully staged for themselves—may find themselves lost. But the essential element, Rostand’s fierce belief in the power of the word to transform, comes through with startling clarity.

Cyrano de Bergerac
Evelyn Miller, Eben Figueiredo, and James McAvoy in Cyrano de Bergerac.. © Marc Brenner.

Cyrano is an explosive poet—in this rendering, the “all-time crazy genius of the spoken word”—who masks his physical insecurities with a confidence fueled by his verbal dexterity. He’s also a champion fighter, the leader of a regiment of the French army. When an attractive airhead, Christian (Eben Figueiredo), enlists and falls mutually head over heels with Cyrano’s cousin Roxane, the poet warrior finds himself caught in the middle. In the play’s greatest dramatic flourish, Cyrano impulsively offers to ghostwrite Christian’s love letters to Roxane, whom he also loves. She’s very quickly flummoxed by the disparity between Christian’s in-person vapidity and the gorgeous richness of the poetry he sends her.

Lloyd uncovers some latent homoeroticism in Rostand’s premise, if not the original text, that deepens Christian’s reckless desire: What does it mean for Christian, played with good-hearted dimwittedness by Figueiredo, to have Cyrano embody him in the letters to Roxane, imagining his most intimate fantasies and speaking as if from inside him? “Is there a world where two men can live as one person?” Christian ponders.

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McAvoy is most magnetic not in his linguistic takedowns but in his quieter scenes opposite Roxane. In his trembling anticipation of Roxane’s confession of love, imagining that he’s the man she adores, only to discover that she cares for Christian, McAvoy reveals Cyrano’s sweet vulnerability, which clashes with the character’s brash, devil-may-care public persona. And McAvoy’s performance renders more sharply than any Cyrano I’ve seen before why the letter-writing fraud at the center of the play means so much to Cyrano: The letters provide a vitalizing pathway for Cyrano to give voice to his feelings to Roxane without the stigma of his appearance getting in the way. He lives through the words he writes to her.

And Roxane’s discovery that she loves the soul in the letters more than the body she lusts for, that skin is just “this envelope the actual person’s hidden in,” emerges like a religious awakening during this Cyrano de Bergerac. Miller, supremely among the cast, bundles so much curiosity and despair and hope, the machinations of a churning mind and a heart, into her voice and posture as she delivers lines sitting unmoving in a chair, that Roxane’s stillness seems less an imposed directorial concept than a character-driven necessity.

In Lloyd’s restrained, seated staging, the famous balcony scene, where Cyrano steps in to speak for the stumbling Christian, swiftly erases Christian entirely. As soon as Cyrano takes over, Christian turns away in his chair, the warped love triangle condenses into a duet, and it’s just two voices, finding love—and each other—in the words that fill the space between them.

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Cyrano de Bergerac is now running at BAM.

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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