“Ah, good my lords, what a nostril is his! When one sees it, one is fain to cry aloud, ‘Nay! ’tis an excessive amount of!”
At any fee, one is fain to cry — as a result of that’s sadly how the title character of “Cyrano de Bergerac” is normally launched, each within the play’s first English translation, a yr after its 1897 Paris premiere, and roughly ever since.
However within the model that opened on the BAM Harvey Theater on Thursday, “freely tailored” by Martin Crimp — so freely it nearly quantities to a brand new play — the flowery phrases and vintage diction of Edmond Rostand’s Belle Époque verse drama, a minimum of as sometimes rendered in English, are lastly absolutely swept away. Cyrano is now launched quite in another way:
“They are saying when he got here by means of his mom’s vagina/the nostril poked out first as a painful reminder.”
This isn’t your grand-mère’s “Cyrano.” Changing Rostand’s stately 12-syllable alexandrines with jumpier rhythms, its euphemisms with plain speech and its good rhymes with ones so slant they function italics, Crimp rockets the motion to a world drunk on language because it’s really spoken. It’s additionally a world wherein, because the baker Ragueneau (now a poet, too) predicts, “There’s going to be a brand new pressure of phrases.”
Is there ever! Which is however one of many causes this manufacturing, fantastically directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring James McAvoy in an nearly actually ravishing efficiency, is a triumph. One other is that new phrases reveal new individuals.
Sure, the central story nonetheless takes the identical triangular form chances are you’ll recall from Broadway revivals (14 since 1898), movie variations (just like the 1987 Steve Martin film) and a minimum of 4 musicals (together with the present one starring Peter Dinklage). The attractive Roxane nonetheless falls in love with the hunky, barely verbal Christian, who with a purpose to fulfill her lust for poetry depends on Cyrano to script his wooing. And Cyrano continues to be in love with Roxane, although he by no means dangers saying so due to that protuberant proboscis.
However in not one of the many variations I’ve seen, even the great ones, has the story appeared alive or its characters absolutely human. The arch verse a minimum of the ruffs and pantaloons too usually flip Cyrano right into a preening fop, which is precisely what he isn’t. Roxane, trapped in her farthingales, has no intercourse or company; Christian no emotion save what Cyrano supplies. As their associates and followers and even their enemies soften into an indistinguishable mass of ribbons, watching the play normally seems like a historic pageant, or a three-hour animatronic exhibition at Versailles.
There’s nothing historic or animatronic in Lloyd’s manufacturing. The motion, although nonetheless set in 1640, concurrently takes place anytime and now. (The Thirty Years’ Battle of the seventeenth century and the Algerian Revolution of the twentieth are each ongoing; the ambient sound is each French Baroque and beatbox.) The stripping of the characters’ speech is matched by Soutra Gilmour’s minimal design: blond wooden platforms for the set, costumes you’ll assume you noticed in Greenpoint final night time. There are not any quill pens, no plumes, no props.
And no, no, there isn’t a nostril.
Which is to say, no prosthetic one. We’re requested to contemplate not solely what ugliness means and the place in a human being it resides, however how a play about phrases should put its religion in them. Thus this telling has the rough-hewed realness of one thing being made up on the spot, which, because it occurs, is one in all Cyrano’s best abilities. Solely now, when he swordfights whereas improvising a poem, the poem is as percussive as a rap and the sword is merely a hand mic.
Wielded by McAvoy, each are astonishing weapons. In his tackle the function, Cyrano’s ardour is sort of secondary to a manic sense of entitlement, partly in response to his bodily self-hatred (a little bit of a stretch with McAvoy, however let’s enable him his personal demons) and partly in response to what he has described, in an interview with Laura Collins-Hughes in The Instances, because the manufacturing’s curiosity in “poisonous masculinity.”
It’s subsequently not incidental that McAvoy, who first performed the function in an acclaimed London run interrupted by the pandemic, brings with him a cloud of superhero depth from film roles like Charles Xavier within the “X-Males” collection. For the primary time in any model of “Cyrano” I’ve seen, the character’s improvisatory brio, his comradeliness, his violence and even his scheme for seducing his beloved by proxy are all tied collectively in an unpretty bundle. When at one level he thinks Roxane has summoned him to proclaim her love, his face flushes pink with pleasure; it’s the identical pink we see in his rages.
I don’t imply to decrease the manufacturing’s emphasis on magnificence, nevertheless it’s a extra difficult sort of magnificence than we’re used to. The scene wherein Cyrano ventriloquizes for Christian has by no means felt so erotic, not solely due to Cyrano’s rapture in delivering it but in addition due to Roxane’s in receiving it. As reimagined by Crimp, and performed by the beautiful Evelyn Miller, Roxane is absolutely impartial of thoughts, even when not of earnings; she is frankly sexual, gleefully manipulative, flattering males’s privilege however all the time seeing by means of it. Evidently, on this model, she doesn’t wind up in a convent.
Neither is Christian (Eben Figueiredo) the toy soldier of most productions. As his dependence on Cyrano grows, his reluctance and confusion do too. These result in a stunning second that however appears fully pure — and even mandatory, finishing the triangle.
That and another main adjustments to the story might really feel like gimmicks to purists. They might additionally object to the Babel of accents bending the vowels and smearing the consonants in a play about speech.
Not I: McAvoy’s neck-tingling burr, and all the opposite sounds made by the splendidly various forged, together with Michele Austin because the regendered Ragueneau and Vaneeka Dadhria because the bubbly beatboxer, reopened my ears to a narrative I knew too nicely. If I used to be stopped from time to time by Crimp’s extra mystifying conceits — a Borscht Belt envoi? — I spent many of the manufacturing’s swift two acts absolutely engaged in its humor, pathos and fury.
And principally its besottedness with phrases. It is a world wherein Cyrano can say “my function/is naked my soul/then crawl again into my lonely language-hole,” making you hear his hopelessness in its fitful line lengths. It’s a world wherein “I’ll rip his tongue out” is a curse worse than demise. Wouldn’t you wish to reside there?
Cyrano de Bergerac
By means of Could 22 on the BAM Harvey Theater, Brooklyn; bam.org. Working time: 2 hours 40 minutes.
