Lloyd’s staging technique is similar to the rehearsal-room aesthetic of his less-successful Betrayal : actors in dark street clothes, on an aggressively bare stage, cold, unflattering lighting and a tendency to face forward and deadpan. With a shaved head, muscular bod poured into tight black jeans and t-shirt, McAvoy is All Snout: a walking, talking organ of exquisite sensitivity.
(In the recent musical film starring Peter Dinklage, Cyrano was treated unfairly due to height.) However, in this punk-rock adaptation of the verse drama, with a ferociously rhyming text by Martin Crimp, McAvoy avoids rubber prosthetics and internalizes the schnoz, as it were. Cyrano has a grotesquely long proboscis that renders him hideous. Why? Anyone who saw the Broadway revivals in 2007 or 2012, or the Steve Martin film knows: it’s the nose. Need I add that Cyrano himself adores Roxane, but it’s hopeless? Since Christian stumbles in speech when talking to Roxane, Cyrano pens billet doux to her on the boy’s behalf, eventually impersonating Christian under cover of darkness. In the seduction department, there’s Christian (Eben Figueiredo), a handsome young soldier who falls head over heels for the headstrong, book-besotted Roxane (Evelyn Miller).
Our title character, the swaggering swordsman-poet played to the hilt by an incandescent James McAvoy, deploys battalions of words to wound or to woo. There is violence in this Cyrano, to be sure.
For that, as I write days after ten people were shot on the subway in Sunset Park, I’m extra grateful. Sleekly minimal, with maximal emotional punch, director Jamie Lloyd’s Cyrano is a weaponless marvel of language. The current, modish version at BAM lacks dangerous hardware-if you don’t count the microphones that characters clutch and spit rhymes into. Marc BrennerĪ traditional staging of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) would normally bristle with weapons: swords on every Frenchman’s hip, then later rifles and deadly cannon as they march to repel Spanish invaders in Arras. Evelyn Miller (Roxane) & James McAvoy (Cyrano de Bergerac).
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