A confession, and a sheepish one for a Francophile to make: my heart does not thrill to the prospect of sitting through “Cyrano de Bergerac.” This may be the fault of my Anglophone ear, which is too clumsy to pick up the rapid-fire panache of Edmond Rostand’s rhyming Alexandrine couplets as they fly by in the original, and English translations have a way of starching the esprit right out of the language. Fairly or not, I have come to associate the play with an aura of whipped-cream foppishness, heavy on swordplay, swishing capes, and swelling bosoms, like the ones in Joe Wright’s recent film adaptation of Erica Schmidt’s musical version. Wright, who cast Peter Dinklage in the title role, traded a big schnoz for small stature as his hero’s signature weakness, a fine idea, but not enough to make up for the general corniness.
I offer such prejudice as an overture to praise for the English director Jamie Lloyd’s dazzling, feral take on “Cyrano,” which has finally arrived at BAM, after a celebrated pre-pandemic run in London. This is not Lloyd’s first Rostand rodeo. In 2012, he directed a production of the play on Broadway—a traditional affair of boots, bodices, and feathered hats. The balcony scene had a balcony; verisimilitude carried the day. Since then, Lloyd has converted to minimalism. The set for his 2019 production of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” basically consisted of two chairs. Now he has blasted away “Cyrano” ’s damask-draped tropes, and what’s left is little more than a bare stage lit by harsh white fluorescents, a fitting backdrop for a strictly formalist mise en scène, all lines and triangles. We’re still nominally in the sixteen-forties, but the costume designer Soutra Gilmour (she’s also responsible for the set) has put the cast in contemporary street clothes—joggers, jumpsuits, Adidas slides. The actors sound contemporary, too, thanks to the playwright Martin Crimp, who, in his capacity as “translator-adaptor,” has radically reworked Rostand’s text. It’s good to be suspicious of the urge to remake classics in our own image, but Crimp’s interventions profoundly energize the soul of the play. He understands that rhyme doesn’t have to be treated as a clopping, powdered-wig contrivance. It’s the lifeblood of hip-hop, the most flexible of modern forms and one with its own battle conventions. Instead of rapiers, Lloyd and Crimp give us rappers. Puns before guns, words before swords: it may sound silly on paper, but it’s dynamite onstage.
First up to the mike is Ligniere (Nima Taleghani), a strutting young poet who presides as m.c., warming up the crowd with some home-town boasts. “The Parisian isn’t superior / just everyone else is inferior,” he brags, adding, “Just never mention Algeria.” (The play’s playful anachronisms delight rather than rankle.) He’s preening for the benefit of Christian (Eben Figueiredo), a provincial soldier who has just arrived in the capital to enlist as a cadet. This being France, Christian has already fallen in love at first sight, with Roxane (the wonderful Evelyn Miller), a lovely university student with brains to match. Christian, alas, is a handsome dummy. How will he manage to pry such a lady from the clutches of her sinister admirer, the Count de Guiche (Tom Edden)?
Enter Cyrano, Roxane’s trusted cousin and the popular leader of Christian’s new regiment—well, first enter Cyrano’s friends’ description of him as the “Madman. Soldier. Writer,” whom they talk up like prizefighter promoters before slicing him down to size. “The enormity /of his nose is a deformity / . . . They say when he came through his mother’s vagina / the nose poked out first as a painful reminder / of all the agony to come.” Ouch. Yet, when Cyrano does appear, he takes the divinely proportioned form of James McAvoy, clad in tight black jeans and form-fitting puffer jacket, with nothing but a smattering of beard adorning his famous face. If that’s agony, sign me up for a world of pain.
Hold on. Here we have one of cinema’s most gorgeous leading men playing theatre’s ugliest. Is this a joke? A gimmick? Maybe. But isn’t a bulbous prosthetic a gimmick, too? If you can get on board with the emperor’s-new-clothes nature of Lloyd’s illusion—and, thanks to McAvoy’s smoldering, ferocious barrage of a performance, it doesn’t take long—the unaugmented nose proves less an obstacle to accepting the play’s conceit than a key to unlocking its deeper levels. Here is a man so affected by the notion of his deformity that he refuses to risk the ultimate humiliation of self-exposure; his block is mental, and thus impossible to surmount.
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Cyrano, too, has a passion for Roxane; while Christian merely appreciates her face, Cyrano adores her beautiful mind. A great strength of this production is its depiction of Roxane as a formidable intellectual force. Her insistence that Christian woo her with wit isn’t a coquette’s trick of putting her beau through the ritualized paces of courtly love but a smart woman’s search for a partner, a worthy match. When Cyrano agrees to help his rival by writing love letters to Roxane and signing Christian’s name, the deception allows him to give voice to his own feelings, of course—but that’s not the only reason he suggests it. McAvoy’s sadboi Cyrano gets off on self-expression and self-abasement, and he can’t always distinguish between the two. In the scene in which a concealed Cyrano pretends to be Christian while speaking to Roxane, McAvoy is so steady, so relentlessly purposeful in his passion, that his Scottish whisper scorches your ears. Cyrano is often played as a man of unfettered brilliance who has learned to be a buffoon as a matter of self-preservation. McAvoy’s Cyrano likes to clown around, too, but make no mistake: his mania and melancholy disguise a desperate rage.
In the play’s second act, de Guiche sends Christian, Cyrano, and the rest of the cadets off to war, and a grimmer reality sets in. There’s a lot here about male competition, male bonding, the male gaze, toxic masculinity, the works—inevitably, homoeroticism is part of the deal, though it’s treated too obviously for my taste, and has the unfortunate effect of sidelining Roxane. One compensation for all this male stuff is the transformation of Rostand’s Ragueneau, a jolly pastry cook and poets’ patron, into a woman (Michele Austin), who mothers Cyrano and Roxane alike, though she can’t save them from an ending even darker than Rostand’s. The truth will out, but it sets no one free.
“Cyrano” is obsessed with theatre. The play, in fact, opens at a play, a horrible take on“Hamlet” that Cyrano interrupts and rips to pieces. He’s an aesthete with a vengeance, who can’t tolerate such “fly-paper for mediocrity.” How I wish that he had been at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre the other day to rescue the audience from Noah Haidle’s dreadful misfire, “Birthday Candles.”
Talk about gimmicks. The show starts on the seventeenth birthday of its protagonist, Ernestine (Debra Messing). She’s making a cake with her mother, a tradition that she will carry on, alone or in company, every birthday, for the rest of her endless life. The passage of time is signalled by a bell: ding, Ernestine is eighteen, then in her thirties, her fifties, and on and on for something like a century. What happens over the decades? Merely every cliché you can think of, from infidelity to divorce to mental illness, enacted by cardboard cutouts instead of characters, who speak in a language of mind-numbing tweeness and banality. “The world is so big,” Ernestine says, with her arms spread wide—and yet not big enough for the two of us.
The incoherent direction, by Vivienne Benesch, left me with a number of questions. When does the action take place? What kind of adolescent plays pin the tail on the donkey? On Ernestine’s thirty-ninth birthday, her daughter is a college senior—was Ernestine pregnant when she went to the prom? How come Messing slides into an English accent when Ernestine gets old? Why did anyone produce this dreck? If sentimentality is a lie about life, “Birthday Candles” is the whopper of them all. ♦
