• Cyrano

6/24/26 (Wed), West End

This is one of my favorite plays of all time and features one of my favorite actors, Adrian Lester, so it was high on my list of shows to see on this trip. Sadly it fell victim to all the bad habits that London theater has fallen into. I had assumed when Lester was announced that Cyrano’s issue would be not with his nose but with his black skin. That is, I could imagine lily-white France being scandalized by a black soldier at the time à la Othello, and Cyrano, for all his bluster, being super self-conscious about his skin, convinced that Roxanne could never accept him as he is. That would have been a trenchant comment on our times and given the show an entirely new relevance. The scene where the rude man comments unwisely on Cyrano’s nose could have been transformed into something more shocking – and imagine the quips that Cyrano could have come up with. (Peter Dinklage did something similar in the role with his diminutive size.)

But the poster, featuring Lester with a dangling schnoz (with an odd white spot on the end, like a white-nosed Rudolph) suggested that that wouldn’t be the case. As it happened, the actor playing Christian was also black (as were both their understudies) along with several other players. Roxanne, who is Cyrano’s cousin, was white, but I’m not sure if we’re supposed to see anything in that or if we’re supposed simply to see all characters as white. Seems like a missed opportunity here.

The real irritant was the joking style and unnatural movements that the actors used throughout. They seemed to be making fun of the text rather than playing it straight, the same thing I noticed in Oliver! the day before. Are they afraid to seem too sincere? Have audiences grown too cynical for Rostand’s gorgeous verse? Cyrano plays on a heightened reality with its poetic prose, virtually a musical without music, and the best productions capitalize on that feature. This translation nicely employed rhyming couplets in English for some characters and scenes in approximation of the original French, but it threw in some crude language for laughs. (The phrase “fucking big nose” plays a big role here, with Cyrano, or Lester actually, even goading the audience into screaming it out.) In any case, the playing style went entirely against what little poetry there was, showing a lack of faith in the material. It was sad to watch.

Director Simon Evans used a small boy as the image of Cyrano’s past, an unnecessary device that has no justification in the story as presented. It opens with a spotlight on the boy, and closes with him as well. It takes away from that magnificent final scene, where Cyrano is supposed to boast proudly as he dies that regardless of everything, he retains his white panache. Here he walks into the sunset with his younger self, a sentimental ending with none of the depth. I had thought that the finale, one of the best in world theater, was indestructible. I guess not.

The actors were functional within the context of this cynical approach. Susannah Fielding as Roxanne gave the most natural performance. Lester was overly “actorly”, fishing for laughs in all the wrong places. He had seemed so right for the role, so his antics were particularly disappointing. I hope he gets a chance to play it again in a more traditional rendering, if those still exist.

I had to apologize afterwards to my friend, who had never seen Cyrano and still hasn’t. I told him to watch the Depardieu movie instead. A big downer.