Only in the last act did I find myself longing for the full romantic works and thinking nostalgically of a 1983 RSC production with Derek Jacobi’s Cyrano sitting under the falling autumn leaves of Ralph Koltai’s design.īut that was then and this is now and McAvoy admirably gives us a fierce, proud, word-intoxicated Cyrano who anticipates Molière’s Alceste in The Misanthrope in his hatred of cant and who speaks for the modern writer in his detestation of VIP sponsorship. The scene where Christian becomes the mouthpiece for Cyrano’s improvised love verses is normally played with Roxane on a moonlit balcony here, the characters sit on plastic chairs on a brightly lit stage and bring out the ironic sadness of the situation. But there is a touch of masturbatory self-pity about his surrogate wooing: he becomes, as Christian says, “the man with the nose / And the acres of highbrow wet-dream prose.” Far from being a simple love object, Roxane is here a bookish intellectual who reacts angrily to the revelation of the truth and even Christian grasps the homoerotic implications of one man using another as the vehicle for his passion.Īt its best, this re-reading of Rostand works beautifully. Their Cyrano is, on one level, the embattled artist who needs hate “so that I can create”. Photograph: Marc BrennerĬrimp and Lloyd are at pains to remind us this is, first and last, a play about the dangerous lure of language: its capacity to both enchant and deceive. Honesty and feminist strength … Eben Figueiredo as Christian and Anita-Joy Uwajeh as Roxane.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |