A conventional staging of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) would usually bristle with weapons: swords on each Frenchman’s hip, then later rifles and lethal cannon as they march to repel Spanish invaders in Arras. The present, modish model at BAM lacks harmful {hardware}—in case you don’t depend the microphones that characters clutch and spit rhymes into. Sleekly minimal, with maximal emotional punch, director Jamie Lloyd’s Cyrano is a weaponless marvel of language. For that, as I write days after ten individuals have been shot on the subway in Sundown Park, I’m further grateful.
There may be violence on this Cyrano, to make sure. Damaged hearts litter the stage. Our title character, the swaggering swordsman-poet performed to the hilt by an incandescent James McAvoy, deploys battalions of phrases to wound or to woo. Within the seduction division, there’s Christian (Eben Figueiredo), a good-looking younger soldier who falls head over heels for the headstrong, book-besotted Roxane (Evelyn Miller). Since Christian stumbles in speech when speaking to Roxane, Cyrano pens billet doux to her on the boy’s behalf, finally impersonating Christian underneath cowl of darkness. Want I add that Cyrano himself adores Roxane, nevertheless it’s hopeless?
Why? Anybody who noticed the Broadway revivals in 2007 or 2012, or the Steve Martin movie is aware of: it’s the nostril. Cyrano has a grotesquely lengthy proboscis that renders him hideous. (Within the latest musical movie starring Peter Dinklage, Cyrano was handled unfairly attributable to peak.) Nevertheless, on this punk-rock adaptation of the verse drama, with a ferociously rhyming textual content by Martin Crimp, McAvoy avoids rubber prosthetics and internalizes the schnoz, because it have been. With a shaved head, muscular bod poured into tight black denims and t-shirt, McAvoy is All Snout: a strolling, speaking organ of beautiful sensitivity.
Lloyd’s staging method is much like the rehearsal-room aesthetic of his less-successful Betrayal: actors in darkish avenue garments, on an aggressively naked stage, chilly, unflattering lighting and a bent to face ahead and deadpan. The flattening of theatrical (and emotional) area is much more pronounced at BAM. Within the first ten minutes, actors squat on a low, white riser, delivering their strains straight out in rat-a-tat rhythms, an nearly numbing monotony that’s damaged when McAvoy (who has been sitting upstage staring right into a mirror) barrels middle stage enraged by a schlocky actor’s mauling of Hamlet. From that time, the stress barely lets up.
I’ve not often seen a performer transfer with such scary depth because the Scot heartthrob McAvoy, who fees and dashes and skitters over the area like a large bull terrier in a slim-fit puffy coat. He’s a powerful stay presence, his Caledonian burr intensely seductive, switching from homicidal rage to flippant comedy in an eyeblink.
McAvoy’s verbal dexterity is sort of obscene: dashing by Cyrano’s well-known self-owns about his facial function (“if model factors you in a sexual path / you may prefer to refer, Valvert, to my nasal erection”) and later slowing all the way down to zen-like simplicity in his well-known love speech to Roxane, which unfolded with the viewers completely holding its breath, Crimp-Cyrano decreasing want to elemental, preverbal roots: “I’m speechless, speechless, all I can say is I need ― I need ― I need ― there is no such thing as a poetry ― there is no such thing as a construction that may make any sense of this ― solely I need ― I need ― I need ― I need you.” For that scene alone, the present ought to transfer to Broadway and let’s polish a figurine for McAvoy.
This isn’t only a star car, although. The varied and extremely proficient ensemble is filled with quirky, interesting actors doing fine-etched work. As Roxane, Miller runs sizzling and jogs my memory of a younger Glenda Jackson: aristocratic but passionate. Nima Taleghani’s cocky-cool Ligniere purringly drives his strains with a slam-poet’s assurance. And, because the villainous however finally pathetic nobleman De Guiche, Tom Edden finds notes of grace for even his rotten wealthy boy.
For those who’ve by no means seen a Cyrano earlier than, you’ll nonetheless get the essential plot, even when references to its 1640 setting produce a momentary psychological blip (Cardinal Richelieu…proper). Extra importantly, Crimp and Lloyd check fashionable attitudes on the, let’s assume, problematic side of two males collectively wooing the identical girl, and the way that triangulation can result in her justified outrage and a lingering, bi-curious kiss between the boys.
“I really like phrases, that’s all. / And with out pen and ink human historical past would fall / right into a black pit / and there’d be nearly no hint of it.” In Crimp’s refreshingly direct and profound strains, Cyrano explains why he talks a lot, and why we maintain listening. An old style romance fitted with fashionable clothes and locutions, this electrifying manufacturing proves that some issues outlast custom and historical past: the facility of affection and of language.
